New Kid Stories S1-E7: My Future Me, Myself, and I
by JustCallMeButtLord
Summary: The New Kid and Kenny team up to go back in time and investigate who has been pulling the strings to rebuild an abandoned science lab somewhere in Park county, and find that the perpetrator is someone they already know well... [Seventh Installment of the New Kid Stories, rated M for language, vulgar descriptions, violence. Cis!Female New KidxKenny, mention of Stendy]
1. Frame Job

_HELLO FANFICTION!_

It is time for another installment of the New Kid Stories, or as I tend to refer to it around the interwebs; NKS. The fic you've clicked into is the _seventh _installment in a series of stories that I write centered on my Cis!Female New Kid from the South Park games and her adventures with her friends.

Before we get started, let's get the usual disclaimers out of the way:

_The NKS series is my** just-for-fun writing project** that I work on to **de-stress.** As such, I do not fuss too hard about **editing**, and chapters are frequently uploaded with **minor errors.** I **WELCOME** being informed about these errors so I can correct them, provided you do so in a **respectful** manner. _

_Due to the fact that South Park is still ongoing, and I started this project A – Before I'd seen the entire series and B – Back when Splatty Tomato was the newest episode, the universe this fic lives in has ended up being **canon divergent. **I will not be bending over backwards in the narrative to address this. As said, these stories are for **funsies, **and I **do not **find chasing down every detail of the canon to make sure every tiny thing works to be **fun. **_

_I write each installment of NKS in a manner that it CAN be read on its own, including relevant context in the narrative so new readers can jump in wherever they please without worrying about reading the entire backlog of the series, but long-time readers can feel rewarded for picking up the little foreshadowing details I've scattered in previous stories for the big culmination... but in this installment, we are **beginning to head into that culmination **that everything has been building up to in the background. I'm pretty sure this story should still read fine to a newbie, but it's kinda like going to see Avengers without having seen any of the movies that came before it. To really get the most out of this story, **I recommend reading the rest of the series first. **_

And finally...

_**Your support as a reader is invaluable. Thank you so much for being here. **_

With all that out of the way,

_ON  
__WITH  
__THE  
__FIC!_

_O**WTF!**_

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Frame Job::**

Doctor Haley Kartwright had just returned to the cabin she was renting on a cloudy Saturday afternoon. The mountain air was bitterly cold, and the sky looked like it was getting ready to snow... _again. _She supposed she should have expected that- this quiet little mountain town perpetually looked like a Christmas card, despite it being only a few days past Thanksgiving. She honestly didn't mind it too much; something about snow always made her feel _nostalgic, _although she couldn't place why... The trouble was that she'd been living the last few years of her life in Atalanta, Georgia, so she was hardly _adjusted _to the constant cold.

Getting back into a heated space was a relief to ease her exhaustion, kicking snow off her boots and shrugging off her coat.

As she divested of her outwear a big, fluffy, black cat popped its head up from the futon next to the door, meowing plaintively while staring at her mistress with yellow eyes. The silky-furred feline wore a pink collar with a little bell on it that jingled as the cat roused from her napping curl and stretched out, kneading the single pillow on the futon before arriving at the edge of the cheap make-shift bed. Once there, she butted her head against her owner's leg, seeking affection.

"Heh... keep your whiskers on, Princess." Kartwright soothed, putting her jacket up on a hook near the door. Beneath the jacket she'd been wearing a set of overall-style snow-pants, which also had to be removed and hung up... but, like most cats, Princess did not have any patience, and continued to meow loudly as Kartwright made a futile attempt at nudging her away so she could finish getting out of her cold weather clothes. At a point, Haley gave up and lifted the cat up off the edge of the bed, cradling her against her chest with one arm. "Oh, _alright, _you win... spoiled brat. Missed me, huh?"

Princess's response was to purr, loudly rumbling as she nuzzled in against Haley's neck. The good doctor hefted the cat high on her shoulder so she could escape the straps that held up her snow pants, sitting on the edge of the futon to finally kick off her boots and wiggle her way out of the protective overalls. Loose from her outwear, she was left in a black hat, dark turtleneck, a set of black pants, thick socks... and an underarm holster for a pistol that never left her person, strapped tight to the left side of her body to be drawn by the right hand.

"Do anything _fun _while I was gone?" Haley idly spoke to her cat, hanging up the wet snow gear and picking up her boots to carry them further into the cabin; to the other side of the futon where an electric heater imitated the look of a fireplace while doing a vastly superior job of heating the room. She dropped the snow-caked footwear on the rug in front of it to let them thaw and dry.

From her shoulder, her cat chirruped back. She doubted the animal was actually holding a conversation with her, but it felt better to talk aloud to _someone_. She had enjoyed many conversations with her cat over the years; entirely one-sided but none the less important to her.

"Me? Oh, _no... _just a four-mile hike in the snow for _fuck all." _She grumbled, flopping backwards onto the folded down futon that she'd been sleeping on since her arrival in this sleepy little berg. Laid out on her back, Princess took the opportunity to climb onto Haley's stomach and settle in; becoming a loaf while her tail lazily swished back and forth. "... I knew it was a long shot, but I'm running out of time..." She muttered.

She could almost hear the audible ticking of a clock; ever since her source at the Agency disappeared on her a mere _forty-eight hours ago, _she'd felt like it was only a matter of time before whomever _disappeared them _did the same to her.

As if to confirm the lurking paranoia that had been the undercurrent of her every waking moment for the past two days, headlights shined through the thin curtains that covered the windows of the cabin.

She could see the beams from where she'd laid down for a few seconds of respite, and tensed as she watched them sweep across the window. She could hear tires outside, making a sort of muffled crunching sound in the snow, and the steady hum of an engine.

Gently, Haley turned and displaced her cat to the surface of the futon, ducking low as she crawled off the edge and pasted herself to the wall, pulling her pistol free with her right hand while she slowly rose up at the far edge of the window to shift the edge of the curtain and peer outside. Princess, sensing her tension, watched with wide eyes and a muffled mewl.

"_Shhh..." _The good doctor hushed. Afternoon was quickly turning into night outside, but there was still enough light to spy the shape of another vehicle pulled up to the area outside the cabin. She could see her rental; a black compact... and a white truck now parked next to it. Nothing special about it; clean, simple, functional; the back bed was empty as far as she could see, and the light within the cab turned on as whomever was in it killed the engine.

She waited, lining up the shot without hesitation, watching as the figure inside the vehicle went through the usual motions of unbuckling a seat-belt and grabbing a bag. The door opened, feet dressed in heeled boots stepped out, followed by a woman in a long tan jacket with a black hat, and a black bag slung over her shoulder and across her body.

Haley blinked. She recognized the woman. Hastily, she holstered her weapon and came around the futon to open the door, flicking on the outdoor porch light as she did so. "Marie!" She greeted, surprised to see the woman and shouting out with hesitation. "What the _hell _are you doing out here?"

"Haley!" Marie answered back with a laugh, working her way across the snow-caked drive and arriving on the front stoop soon enough. She was an older woman; perhaps thirty years Haley's senior, but she moved with the purpose of someone much younger than herself. "I could ask you the same thing." She returned with a laugh. "The stuffed shirts upstairs offer you a _month _anywhere you wanna go, and you pick _here? _What the hell is this? A _shack?" _

"Basically." Haley smirked, backing off from the door. "Come in, before you let all the heat out- did you come out all this way just to check on me?"

"Oh I wish." Marie answered, stepping in and stomping off her heeled boots on the rug just past the door as Haley shut the door behind her, sliding her hat off of her head to reveal a short-cropped mess of curly brown hair that had been dulled by a growing force of gray strands. Haley hadn't seen her in a while, but she felt like Marie was going silver at an _astonishing _rate- then again, as far as she knew, the woman led a stressful life... although Haley never found out exactly what it is she _did._ "No, no, I have... _business _in the area." Marie continued.

"Lemme guess... the _super squirrely secret _kind?" Haley posited. When did Marie have any _other _kind of business? As far as Haley knew, she was some kind of liaison, involved in _multiple _agencies and given excessively high security clearance. She was one of the people that she considered tapping to try and help her figure out this mess out in South Park... but decided not to. Marie always did things by the book; if she so much as _smelled _someone doing something under the table, she was the type to report it in a heartbeat.

"More of the _personal _variety, actually." Marie returned, tucking her hat into her long coat, which she made no move to take off. "I'm afraid I can't stay long..." She lamented, surreptitiously glancing about the room. Haley felt faintly embarrassed- the place was a mess. Beyond the living space with the futon, and the kitchen area to the right of the door, all the rest was devoted to the work she was doing; cheap fold-out tables straining beneath boxes of paper records she'd managed to pull, or loose pages of her own notes as she tried to pin-point the location of the abandoned lab. The only hint of technology in the room was a silver laptop she used for data organization- the rest of the operation was in physical media; paper and ink. "... what in the world are _you _up to...? I thought you were on vacation."

"I am." Haley returned simply with a shrug, though she imagined this was how people felt when their mother suddenly visited them out of the blue, without any time to clean or make their space look like they had their life together.

She supposed Marie was the closest person Haley had to a mother- if she had any other family, she did not remember them... but Marie had been there for her from the first day she _could _remember.

She'd been there every step of the way, after the accident. From meetings with psychiatrists after the amnesia diagnosis, to her finally finding work within the CDC when it turned out she had a rather expansive existing knowledge of pathogens that could be tested, licensed, and certified. Marie was, in no small measure, the reason Haley had _any _kind of life outside of an institution.

"I'm _also _attending to some personal business." She stated. "The CDC doesn't regulate what I do with my free time or my own resources- the only thing they're paying for is the cabin rental and the car."

"Minding your manners, I see." Marie noted with a subtle nod, taking a step in. "... I don't suppose this has something to do with P0069, does it?"

Haley's shoulders tensed. Something felt... wrong. Marie's tone had changed; from affable and friendly to a carefully enunciated, emotionless query.

"... how'd you know about that?"

"I keep tabs on many things, Haley. You thought I stopped looking after you?" Marie's hand shifted, into a pocket to draw out her cellphone, idly checking it and making a few taps at the screen after unlocking the device with a swipe. "You finding your way back here was always a possibility, but I didn't expect it to all come together like this... then again, we always had a habit of sniffing in places we didn't belong."

The warm feeling of a reunion pulled back, and Haley found herself stepping backwards from her old mentor. She was diving down to the same place she'd been moments ago; tense and ready to defend herself, the loosely holstered pistol under her arm getting drawn back out. "What the _hell _are you talking about? _We?" _

Marie didn't even look up. She remained focused on her phone, lazily scrolling through something on her screen. "It's not your fault, really. This was going to happen sooner or later. _Nasty business, _but... for the best."

Marie tapped at her phone screen, making a selection.

A sound stabbed at Haley's ears- something... it was almost _too high _to actually hear, but the nature of it made it _stab into her skull _so intensely she felt like she was going to be driven to her knees. Feet spread wide as she fought against an unseen force, teeth gritting together while her pistol drooped, failing to keep her aim. On the futon, Princess _yowled _and dove away, darting as far away from the sound as she possibly could and knocking over a box of files in the process.

_What the hell was that? _It felt like a sound that somehow had the power to stab into her fucking _brain-_

The sound ended, and Haley tried to regain herself. Whatever the hell was going on her, fucking around looking for answers was no longer an option. She had full intent to _shoot _the woman on her welcome mat-

"_Stop." _Marie intoned, still flat, still cold. A single word, not a shout, but definitely an order.

And, despite very much not wanting to stop... Haley did. She froze in place, unable to lift her arms up the rest of the way to point her gun, and unable to pull the trigger to shoot. She remained in the awkward, somewhat crumpled posture that vicious noise had forced her into, feeling as if someone had poured quick-set cement around her body.

_She couldn't even breathe. _

"Stand up straight." Marie added after the first command. "Breathe normally. Put your gun back in your holster."

Each thing happened in sequence, without Haley deciding to do it. Her body moved without her consent, feet coming together and her back straightening out, breath passing in and out of her lungs, and her pistol getting tucked back into its holster once more. Once she'd taken on the stance she'd been told to take, she found herself frozen again... and told to breathe normally, she could not hold her breath, no matter how she tried. She was compelled to do as she was told, unable to fight.

Marie didn't look at her, passing by her to instead look over the tables of files she had in the room. She said nothing, making no noises of approval or disapproval, simply checking over the work Haley had been doing, moving papers about and, occasionally, tucking something into the black bag she wore strapped across her chest.

_She ordered me- she played a noise and controlled me- this sounds like what that fucking **kid **can do; Dee talked about figuring out how to manipulate people with her voice. It's what she did to the President to stop goons coming after her and her family... has Marie had the same power this whole time?!_

Haley had to fight it. _She had to- _there was something in her, desperate and squirming, that refused to be controlled. The harder she tried to force herself against what she'd been ordered to do, the more she felt like she could isolate pieces of her body and bring them back under her sway. As Marie disappeared behind her, out of her vision and still combing through her papers, she managed to force the fingers on her right hand to curl. Slowly, _very slowly, _she forced that one part of her body to obey her.

All at once, it was like the spell was broken, and she stumbled forward before swinging around- balled-up fist first, with a _roar _of violently drawn air getting forced out.

"_Hold still!" _

A fresh order, and her body went ridged again. She was unbalanced, only one foot in contact with the ground, the other leg bent up as she'd twisted herself to throw her entire body into a punch. All at once, she crashed to the floor, and landed hard on her thrown-out left arm that had been meant to act as a counter-balance while she moved. With her full body coming down on the outstretched limb, unable to brace or twist, her wrist was the first thing to land, and horrible pain shot up her arm as she felt something _pop _out of place.

Frozen like a mall mannequin, gravity took over, and her body rolled back, leaving her staring up at the ceiling. Marie appeared above her, looking regretful.

"_Tsk... _you're _resistant... _I suppose I shouldn't be surprised. No time to comb through everything, then. Let's get the ugly part of this done with."

_Ugly part? What the hell are you going to make me **do? **_

"I'm afraid little Lyssie and her friends have already gotten entirely too much help from you... much more and they might actually be able to track me down before I'm ready. It's a pity, my dear, by I'm afraid you've _out-lived your usefulness... _but you can do one last thing for me. For _us, _really." She paused, stepping away and making a motion towards one of the fold-out tables. It was in the kitchen area; the one closest to a cheap drip coffee machine Haley had bought for long nights at the computer. There was also her stacks of notebooks to write in, as well as pens, ensuring she always had something to scrawl _with _and _on. "Get up and write an apology to the children you've been helping. Tell them you worked at the lab, and you were trying to cover it up by giving them a false trail, and that you can't live with the guilt anymore." _

The order was clear; there was no room for interpretation. Haley's body moved despite her very much not wanting to do _anything _she'd just been told. She fought it as her feet carried her to that desk, and her right hand picked up a pen after flipping to a fresh sheet of notebook paper. Her hand scrawled the words exactly as she was told to write them, and no amount of fighting could even get the script to shake.

Her other hand, her left hand, hung uselessly from a painfully dislocated wrist. It _hurt so much, _it made it hard to concentrate on anything else.

Marie arrived behind her, peering over her shoulder and nodding in approval as Haley signed the note with her name.

"Good. _Now take your gun out of your holster, and shoot yourself in the head." _

Horror was the only sense Haley had as her hand complied, dropping the pen to reach back and draw out her pistol for the third time that night... but this time it wasn't in self-defense. No, this time, she hefted up the weight of the firearm in her hand... and it turned upon her. She watched as her body acted without her, and the muzzle of the gun pointed between her eyes, the cold metal of the barrel coming to rest against her forehead.

Her finger squeezed the trigger.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

AND THAT'S HOW YOU FUCKIN' START A STORY, AMIRITE?

I ain't spoiling anything down here, so I'll just see y'all in the next chapter, aye?

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	2. Low Tech Texting

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Low Tech Texting::**

_What did this mean?_

Dee had left the house while her father had been on the phone, first to call his wife and ask about the missing medicine... and then to call the police to report a robbery. It wasn't the sort of thing she wanted to leave behind; she wanted to stay and try and help figure things out, but there was the unfortunate reality of her being a _student _on a Monday morning who had a bus to catch.

She just hated that she had to leave when it was _her _medicine that was gone- the extra little _something _that gave her the _oomph _she needed to rip time, space, and _ass _on command, and took regularly so that she had that power at her disposal at all times. The discovery that her supply was missing, that someone had gotten into her house and _taken _the key to her temporal abilities...

It wasn't doing anything for her paranoia, that was for sure. She'd gone to the bus stop effectively spaced, arriving last and only moments before the bus got there. She took her usual seat on auto-pilot; the little half-seat in the very back of the bus that she monopolized to herself. She wasn't really _there, _instead trying to imagine who the _fuck _might have taken her pills. The first candidate was Cartman- she and Eric's relationship was... _contentious, _but she dismissed that idea as soon as it arrived. She'd taken her medicine on Sunday morning; the box had been in its place at that time, and Eric had been _busy _on Sunday- first being grounded, and then committing arson on a pizzeria.

Who else knew about her medicine, and where her family kept it? It wasn't just the active box that had gone missing- her parents apparently had a stockpile of the stuff, secured in their room, and _that was gone too. _No one knew about that- _she _hadn't known about that until that morning.

"_Hey, you okay?" _

Dee blinked, her thousand-yard-stare refocusing as she turned her head beneath the fur lined hood of her coat, a stray candy-red curl of hair falling into her face as she peered across the aisle to find Kenny had hopped seats. He usually sat one row up, with Cartman, but had slipped back a seat to perch his butt on the edge of Stan and Kyle's bench... upon which Kyle was alone, without Stan. Where the hell was he? She'd been so in her own head she hadn't even noticed someone from the group wasn't _there. _

Kenny's muffled question to her condition took several seconds to register, making her dull look of confusion as good a response as any. When she finally caught up enough with her current moment to try and communicate a response, she realized that all her usual ways of doing so were cut off. She'd ended up losing her phone in yesterday's fire, along with her favorite pair of boots. _Texting _him was how she usually conveyed things that were too complex to get across with looks and the occasional gesture, but it seemed now was time for a _lower tech _option.

She held up her finger, requesting a moment as she grappled with her backpack to pull out a notebook and a pen. Her longhand was _sloppy _at best, but would get the message across quickly.

_'My pills are gone. Disappeared. There's no sign of forced entry, but they're the only thing that's missing. Dad thinks it might have been a robbery. He was calling the police when I left home.'_

She handed the entire notebook across, with the pen. The last thing she wanted was Cartman to hear her time traveling ass was on the fritz. She had enough shit to deal with without him sniffing out an opportunity to fuck with her.

Despite the obscuring hood, she could watch Kenny's face transform into an expression of dread that perfectly matched what she felt at the moment. _This was bad, _and they both knew it. He looked up at her after reading the note, blinking a few times before he clicked the pen to write back.

_'FUCK' _was the first word he wrote, in block letters, given its own line on the page apart from the rest of his response. '_Do you think whoever took them knew about the backup supplies?'_

_The backup supply- _she hadn't forgotten about it, but she'd been too wrapped up in her own shit to think about it. She and Kenny were partners; still working together as Buttlord and Mysterion to keep South Park safe from the weirder things that tended to happen in this town... and staying prepared had been an evolving process. A couple weeks ago, Dee had been caught in the middle of a crisis without her ability to fuck with time because she'd spent the whole day out and not taken her medicine that day; something she was still paying for in the long healing process from lacerations, burns, and mild smoke inhalation. Since then, she'd squirreled away a few extra doses of her medicine so that she'd have better access on busy days. Both Kenny and Wendy had been trusted with a blister sheet containing four of the little white pills apiece, and she herself had tucked a dozen at school; eight doses in her regular locker, four in her gym locker.

_'I don't know. I'm going to check when we get to school. This all gives me a bad feeling, after what happened at the garage on Saturday night. I never got the chance to tell you about it, and I'm still confused. The more I think about what I remember, the less it makes any sense... and trying to make it make sense only makes it worse. I thought it could all wait until after Karen's party.'_

She paused. Her already sloppy handwriting was getting erratic. She felt raw; exhausted and spent. Going back to those confused memories from Saturday night, what she'd been _certain _of when Butters had found her unconscious and alone, became upsetting and bewildering the longer she tried to parse it out and understand it.

Despite the distress, she started writing an explanation.

_'I went into the garage alone; Butters had to stay outside with that stupid doll from health class because it started screaming. There was someone there. I try to remember, and I think it was Dr Kartwright, but the rest is blurry and doesn't make any sense. There was a gunshot, and a broken skylight- but if she had a gun and she's actually a traitor, why didn't she just shoot me? Why shoot the skylight? I was running, my face got messed up by running into something, and I still have bumps and bruises everywhere. At the time the only thing I could clearly remember was a white truck, the kind you might rent for moving stuff; clean and without markers, with something in the back covered with a silver tarp. That's the only part of the memory that feels right. Everything around it feels wrong. Even what happened after; both Butters and Kyle offered to go with me if I wanted to take the fight to the doctor that night, but I said no.'_

Writing it down increased her certainty. Something happened that night that didn't get logged in her mind the way it happened. Even the way she'd acted after... pragmatic, maybe, but she'd _never _been the sort to favor measured action over _rushing in and beating things into a bloody pulp. _The decision to wait until the full group could be gathered and a plan formed didn't feel like it belonged to her. It felt more like... _stage direction._

_'The next morning I was pissed and tired. I couldn't sleep because of that fucking baby doll and my cat trying to fucking kill it, but now I'm wondering if it was more than that. Maybe I was fighting it unconsciously. Dad called me by my nickname, and I think I remembered someone else saying it the night before. The voice wasn't Kartwright's. Remembering made me upset. That's when I ran out.'_

That was a report of everything up to the point they ran into each other on Sunday morning. Kenny, Karen, and Kevin had been outside her door, about to invite her out to a special birthday breakfast Kenny had saved up for to treat his little sister, and Karen had _insisted _on inviting her... which had provided her with an escape after having a bit of a _blowout _with her parents that morning.

Handing the notebook back, she was nervous as she watched Kenny read. She'd meant to save all this shit back until later- after school today, at the earliest. Her medicine going missing, however, had forced action. No matter how she read this situation, _someone knew _she needed those pills, knew where to find them, and had gotten in and out of her home without notice. She felt the urge to be _suspicious _of Kartwright, but then there was that discord within her own memory, and she felt a headache blooming between ears that rang faintly like someone was blowing a dog-whistle in her general area.

_Finger fucking Patrick's chocolate starfish, I'm too tired for this shit. I just wanna sleep until it's Christmas... is that too much to ask? _

Kenny didn't take nearly as long with the notebook as she did, but it appeared Kyle was taking notice of them at this point. The guy had shrugged of Kenny's swapping seats at first, but observing them pass notes back and forth had captured his curiosity. "Dudes, what's going on?"

Kenny looked to Dee, and she nodded. Kyle had been part of the investigation team when they'd searched garages; she had no problem with keeping him in the loop. She wanted to notify Butters, Stan, and Wendy as well; they might have some ideas on how else to tackle this.

"What's going on _h'near?" _

Eric's head popped up over the seat in front of Kenny and Kyle, looking back from above. Kenny quickly pulled the notebook into his chest, protecting its contents.

"None of your business, Cartman." Kyle responded instantly.

"Oh, so you're on the side of the _butt-fucking traitors now, Keyl?" _Cartman glared. "And here I thought you were on _my side- _manipulative fuckin'-"

"Don't you fucking say it, fat boy!" Kyle barked, half standing out of his own seat to get on Eric's level, not letting him have the high ground. "You can be mad at _me _all you want for telling you the truth, but you pushed Kenny and Dee into a corner and made them feel like they _had _to play your stupid games! _You _put everything into motion!"

"_Aaaaaaah." _Cartman's mouth opened in a long sound of faux realization. "So it's all _my _fault, _it makes so much more sense now! _I guess I forgot I wore the open-backed shirt that invited my friends to _stab me in the back! _Maybe next time I'll go with the miniskirt so we can just do away with all the foreplay and you fuckers can _gang rape me properly!" _

"_Get over it, Eric." _Kenny grumbled. _"You're sad about Heidi. We get it." _

Dee felt like she'd missed the first half of this conversation; like this fight had started at the bus stop and she'd been too spaced to hear a word of it.

Eric seemed tired. He was still making all the usual noises, but everyone seemed just a little... worn out.

All of this wasn't just happening to her. Every crisis in the past few months had involved her friends as well. _They were all running out of steam._

Kenny handed the notebook back while Kyle and Eric kept shouting at each other.

_'Wanna cut class? I could pull a fire alarm or something and spring us. The sooner we know what we have to work with, the sooner we can figure out what our options are to investigate.'_

It was a move that would almost certainly get her in massive trouble... but hopefully her parents would let her explain after the fact. Hell, if she was _grounded _after all this, at least she'd have an excuse not to get involved with any more bullshit for a while.

She looked to Kenny, giving him a nod while she flipped her notebook to a new page. He nodded back; they had a plan. The particulars of _when _to set it in motion would be up to him; he was always the master of finding the right opportunity to exploit. Meanwhile, she took her pen and hurriedly scribbled something else on the fresh page before ripping it out, shoving it up towards Cartman where he and Kyle were _still _fighting.

"_-what the-? _The fuck is _this, _Douchebag? I don't want whatever gay-ass fucking bullshit you're writing, you probably farted on it."

She didn't give up, scooting to the edge of her seat to force the piece of paper into his face. _Just take it, asshole, it's important. _

"_I said I don't fuckin' want it dicklicker!" _

Eric flailed, knocking the sheet of paper away from his face and knocking it out of Dee's hand, the now torn sheet of paper falling on Kyle's side of the divide where he snatched it up... and read the short message aloud.

"_I'm sorry about Heidi, and the drawing. It was a dick thing to do, and I apologize." _

Things went oddly quiet in their little section of the bus. Eric ceased his flailing, arrested on the spot like he'd been splashed in the face with cold water. Abruptly, he reached over the back of his seat to snatch the note back out of Kyle's hands, disappearing back into his seat with it, not looking at anyone.

Dee leaned back, tucking her notebook back into her pack and letting out a sigh. She had a lot of feelings about Cartman- most of them negative... but that didn't change that what she'd done around both the drawing and Heidi had been... _underhanded. _She couldn't claim the high ground there. She didn't usually _try _to claim the high ground- they all knew she was an asshole who reacted to most things by punching them, _but... _

They were all tired. They were all worn out, and she didn't want to keep fighting within her own group. Cartman was _part _of that group. He was part of the group that became the first humans in real _meat space _that she considered her friends- not the legions of online 'friends' and 'followers' and 'subscribers' that regurgitated whatever the hell she fed them through social media. No, her group was a group of assholes and idiots who disagreed with her, fought with her, laughed both with and at her, fought back when she threw punches, and got on her nerves pretty much every damn day.

In a word, they were real. And just as often as they were complete and utter _dick-asses_, they were the reason she was still interested in the real world- Eric included.

They were all assholes, _especially Cartman._

They were also her best friends. Friends she would not have if Cartman hadn't drug her into his games back when she'd first moved in, a few years ago.

Weighed against all that? She owed him an apology.

"Dude, are you sure that was a good idea?" Kyle murmured from a cross the aisle, staring at her with wide eyes as she melted back against her bus seat. Kenny was looking too- eyebrows raised high enough that they disappeared beneath the clumpy fur lining of his tightly drawn hood.

She nodded faintly, closing her eyes after. Maybe she could catch a mini-nap before they got to school.

_Can't go to war when you've got fighting in your own camp... and something tells me shit is about to get fucking real._

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

IDK how we ended up in feels town but hell here we are.

For the person who reviewed that the first chapter got things started with a _bang; _I cackled for possibly a full minute after reading that. Well played.

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	3. Empty Spaces

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Empty Spaces::**

The true joy of having her hoodie back [or rather, having replaced the ruined hoodie with a functionally identical one] was that Dee could safely ditch her binder during the day. The bulky sweater hid the shape of her person to the point where she could get away with a high impact sports bra instead, her ribs allowed to flex freely as she took off from the bus at a full run the moment she was free of the crowd of students slowly milling their ways towards the door, bobbing and weaving in her rush to get ahead and get to her hiding places as fast as possible.

There was nothing like the cold shock of Colorado mountain air to wake a kid up from a bus power-nap.

Her first destination was the gym locker rooms; they were closer to the front door, and a path easily ducked into while the halls were full of students on the verge of getting the day started. Moving fast drew the ire of the hall-monitors, but they lost track of her before office referrals could be written... and most of the dweebs on hall duty remembered what kind of fresh hell she could open up on kids who got in her way from the _Stick of Truth _days, and turned a blind eye once they realized who was dashing between walkers.

Ducking into the boys locker room, she wasted no time in getting to her locker, spinning the combination into the dial embedded in the metal door and lifting the latch to find her gym clothes stuffed into the little cube of space, along with a set of athletic shoes. Lifting the disorganized pile of stuff, she slipped her hand underneath, expecting to find the hard corner of a blister pack.

She didn't.

She felt her heart drop into her stomach. _Not good._

Next stop was her actual locker, trotting out of the locker rooms and back into the general flow of foot traffic and, again, picking up the pace by slipping between knots of kids clinging to their last few social minutes before the weekend was officially over. Entering her grade's wing, there was the sound of those _damn baby dolls _that had been assigned to them over the weekend for the child development unit of science class.

_Oh. Right. That bullshit... uuuugh hopefully Ace will be merciful- it's not like I **meant **to lose mine. I mean. **Kinda.**_

There wasn't any time to think about that disaster and the fact that her family was probably going to be fined for the loss of school equipment- right now she was rushing up through the long hall from the central part of the building, past doors that led off to specialty classes like band, choir, and shop, and arrived in the part of the wing home to lockers and regular classrooms. Due to her sprinting, she'd actually gotten ahead of the main herd of kids coming from the buses, now slipping between the smattering of kids who arrived early for before-school programs or because they got to school by some way other than the bus.

Arriving at the appropriate locker bay, she skidded to a harsh stop before hers. She was in such a rush to spin in the combo that she overshot one of the three numbers and had to do it again, giving the locker an aggravated kick when she fucked it up and had to start over again.

_Fuck**fuck**fuck**fuck**fuck-_

The latch lifted, and she reached into the upper shelf of the thin, tall space that was her personal storage at school. It was where she kept text books when she didn't need them at home or for a specific class. None of them looked as if they'd been moved, and nothing suggested the stretchy fabric book covers she employed on them had been disturbed- things were exactly as she'd left them on Friday, without any suggestion that anything had been touched.

She grabbed her science book by the spine- the one with the blue cover stretched over it to protect it from wear and tare. Opening it up to the back, she reached inside the elastic edge of the book cover.

There was nothing there.

_Both my hiding places. **Who the fuck did this? **_

She closed her locker with force, both hands left on its face as her head drooped down from her shoulders, trying to _think. _She hadn't told anyone where these stashes were- Kenny knew she _had _a stash at school, but not where... and even if someone saw the stuff, the blister packs just looked like generic medicine for any number of conditions, and no student would know where her family kept the stuff at home. Again, the only one who might have _guessed _at these hiding places _and _knew how important this shit was to her was... well, _herself and Kenny- _and she didn't have an ounce of doubt in her against her partner.

_What if it's me? … not **me, **me, but... another version? Am I trying to stop myself from doing something stupid? Would going back do some kind of damage, and I'm pulling some kind of temporal work-around right now?_

The consideration made her head hurt, but it was always a possibility. The trouble with being able to temporally displace herself at will meant that _self fuckery _was always on the table... but last time she'd messed with her own timeline she'd at least been good enough to give herself a fucking _explanation_.If she was stealing her own medicine, she would have left herself a note with the reasons why it was necessary to prevent excess shenanigans.

Frustration made a fist ball up, plowing it into the door of her locker, only mildly aware of how much doing so hurt her knuckles. The strike left a faint dent.

_It doesn't make any sense!_

Before she could do any more damage to school property, someone skidded around the end of the locker bay. Her head twisted to the motion in her peripheral vision, unconsciously wearing a vicious glare that didn't have time to deal with any of the mundane shit of today. No; someone was _messing with her _and she was going to find out _who _and beat them into a quivering pile of giblets.

She blinked. It was Kyle. He was a touch out of breath, like he'd made a similar run through the school... or at least through this wing, where there weren't as many hall monitors.

"No luck?" He asked- she had to surmise that Kenny got him up to speed while she'd been passed out on the bus.

She scoffed, a harsh burst of air coming out her nose as she stepped away from her locker before she hit it again. Tension was wrapped up in her shoulders, and she felt _dangerous. _

"I texted Wendy- she's still home sick today. Her supply is gone, too." Kyle reported. "She said she can make an opportunity for you and Kenny to get back to town without getting in trouble."

The news was a blow; not just _her _house then. Wendy had been raided, too- and she was exceptional at keeping her shit safe. That left just one possible hiding place; Kenny's place... but the trend was depriving Dee of any optimism.

Hearing that Wendy had a way back to town was _something- _and she was too wound up to even be surprised. It was just accepted with a nod.

_Have her do it, then. _

"I'll give her the go-ahead." Kyle reported, pulling out his phone to do so.

She felt naked without her cellphone. It, too, had been lost in the fire yesterday, and it appeared Kenny was also mobile disabled right now. If she were less ready to rip something in half at that moment, she might have thanked Kyle for his help with a hug... but for now she took the few short steps needed to reach the end of the locker bay and look up and down the hallway for Kenny; he must have been somewhere behind her... _ah- _there! Just entering the space that ran between the locker bays and the classrooms, walking at a brisk pace to catch up with Kyle without attracting attention.

_Where's Stan? He wasn't on the bus this morning... _

As if sensing her errant thought about a missing friend, Kyle spoke while still looking at his phone. "Stan's out sick, too. I'm betting he visited Wendy and picked up whatever she caught over the weekend."

… _checks with chart. Damnit, Stan, don't kiss sick people. _

"_What's the word?" _Kenny called up as he approached the group, making no motion to go to his locker and unload his backpack.

"No luck here." Kyle reported. "Just gave Wendy the word, should be any minute now..."

_What is Wendy gonna do? What can she do from home that would get us outta school and back to town? _

There was an electronic tone from above; the sound the school's PA system made right before a general announcement to the whole building. The voice was a familiar one; Principal Victoria, who had been hired back by the district after the whole _Hot Cosby _scandal died down, and moved up the chain to minding the middle school when the new building went up and the grade levels were split between the locations. Her northern mid-west accent was usually the voice of assemblies, rarely heard over the PA unless a kid was getting called to the office from a classroom... and, as usual, kindly and calm tone betrayed nothing over the speakers.

"_Attention, all students and staff; please evacuate the building to the bus parking lot. Repeat, all students and staff to the bus parking lot in an orderly fashion. This is not a drill, please evacuate the school." _

…_. what did she **do? **_Dee wondered, briefly staring up into the open air while blinking at the abrupt announcement. The words _this is not a drill _had sewn an anxiety into the air as the growing mob of students going to their lockers around them were given pause and began collecting their things to head back and do as they were told.

"... do I even _wanna _know what she pulled to get that to happen?" Kyle wondered aloud, uncertainly echoing Dee's own thoughts, a look of shock on his face.

"_Sounds like she sent in a bomb threat." _Kenny observed blithely. _"She's pretty good at legit-looking shit at this point; lotta practice- the school has to ship us to a safe location while they call in the bomb squad to go through the building with a fine toothed comb." _

_That's what she meant by not getting us in trouble- they can't take attendance on the buses. If me and Kenny slip away when we arrive back in town, no one will even know we're gone. Wendy, you're **amazing**._

Dee looked to Kenny, and the pair of them shared a moment of eye contact before trading a nod. It was time to get going.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

Short chapter, but after struggling so damn hard with my sense of _flow _on the last story I'm not arguing this time. Sometimes a chapter needs to be short to convey the appropriate punctuation to the scene change.

And damn skippy I brought back Principal Victoria, she's glorious and I miss her XD

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	4. Sneaking Back

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Sneaking Back::**

Kenny didn't have much hope when they arrived back at his house, he and Alyssa having slipped away from the crowd of kids as they were dropped outside the community center. They'd gone the back way; slipping through half-finished construction of forgotten building projects and dodging hobos, wanting to avoid any adult attention they might attract by just running along sidewalks.

The entire way, he was trying to figure out what the hell was going on. Who did this? _Who could have done this? _He'd been narrowing down possibilities ever since he heard Alyssa's scrawled account of what happened... and he had a terrible feeling about what remained once the _impossible _was removed.

The longer he thought about it, the more certain he was that it was the only possibility... and it left him almost certain that his stash would be raided, too.

Slipping into his room from the back yard through the secret passage in his closet, Kenny entered first and turned back to offer Alyssa a hand as she came through. Once she was upright, he didn't waste any time, hurrying over to the busted set of drawers at the end of his bed and giving a harsh yank to the top drawer to force it open despite it very much not wanting to. He didn't stop at just opening the drawer, however. He placed his foot against the frame of the dresser, continuing to pull at the dysfunctional drawer until it had nearly come completely free of the dresser, and tilted the box of plywood downward until the top edge of the rear panel stuck out from the hole in the structure.

Holding the drawer with one hand to prevent it from falling completely free, as he doubted he could get the damn thing back into the hole if it did, he reached behind that rear panel with the other hand and slid is fingers along the backside of it.

He expected to come up empty.

Instead, his fingers caught on the hard edge of a blister pack. He grasped it, yanking it out and getting the piece of silver duct tape he'd used to secure it as well. Pulling the object free, he almost didn't believe it- there it was. A silver pack of four white pills, each held in their own clear plastic bubble with foil backing.

"_Holy shit." _

Dee snatched at the package, staring at it with wide eyes- she couldn't believe it either. _His stash had been undisturbed. _

Four doses. That wasn't a lot; Alyssa needed a pill every day to keep her gas at time-ripping strength, but he could tell she already knew exactly where she wanted to start- with those muddled memories from Saturday night. Shit had happened too close together to be a coincidence.

"_Time to suit up?" _He quested, shoving the drawer back into place.

She looked up at him- was she still getting over the shock? Had she also been on the verge of accepting that they'd be locked into the conventional rules of time, and would have to figure out what the fuck was going on the old fashioned way? It looked like it, but she didn't take long to get over it. Her expression changed, away form surprised disbelief to one of determination. She popped the foil on one of the little white pills, tipping her head back and dry-swallowing it without hesitation.

When her chin came back down, he could tell she was ready to do this.

_Buttlord and Mysterion- time traveling crime fighters. God **damn **someone needs to make that into a comic._

* * *

Getting suited up had required returning to Dee's house. Unlike Kenny, who had to regularly rebuild the Mysterion costume due the... _disposable_ nature of his flesh and whatever that flesh was wearing, and thus by consequence had a few duplicates of the costume that were kept in a number of places, Dee only had the one Buttlord suit.

The costumes weren't _required, _of course, but they had their uses. The masks, hoods, and otherwise decreased the chances of being recognized if they needed to interact with anyone in the past, limiting questions of how they managed to be in two different places at once. Those who _knew _who was behind the mask were always aware of the time travel, and didn't need explanations. Furthermore, their target time frame was Saturday night; dark clothes would be helpful for sneaking in the shadows- more so than bright orange and electric blue.

Lastly, the costumes were just fuckin' cool. Who wanted to uncover mysteries in their street clothes?

Dee and Kenny had worked together to get back to the neighborhood and get to her house, having to duck through a few back yards and climb up and over fences. Arrival at her own house from the rear always felt a little odd, and she kept low as they came up along side the house to slip directly into the basement from outside, via the thin storm window that sat mere inches off the ground. She watched as Kenny got it open almost without effort, and moved aside for them both to shove their school bags through before sliding down themselves.

Before slipping down into the basement, Dee glanced towards the street. There was a car parked out there- a squad car. The police must have arrived to investigate the house after dad reported the robbery.

_Fuck._

Chunks of snow fell in as she hurried through, turning and shutting the window behind her before hopping down from the long work table that was just below it. Kenny was ahead of her, digging into his backpack for his Mysterion effects while ducking into the space beneath the stairs to change. She hurried to the closet beneath the steps herself, unlocking it with a key she kept on her person as a general rule and pulling out the Buttlord effects and not waiting to change. Kenny was around the corner, and there wasn't time for being bashful- not while she could hear unfamiliar steps on the upper floor of some poor beat cop searching for evidence of a break in.

If the cop was doing their job properly, it was only a matter of time before someone came down to the basement. She ditched her winter coat with its faux-fur lined hood, yanked off her black knit hat, and heel-toed out of her shoes while in short order, stuffing each item onto the shelf in the little cupboard in sequence. Her cargo jeans went next, replaced with black sweats from the Buttlord pile. Her blue shirt with the yellow star on the chest was swapped for a black sleeveless, and the long, heavy coat with its many hidden pockets was pulled on instead. Her black hard mask was secured over her face, the band slipping back over her curly-ass hair to contain the longer strands as well as it could, and her hood was flipped up over the top. Final to the transformation was her other set of boots; the black ones that weren't _quite _as heavy as her recently lost _[RIP]_ big uglies, and had steel toes for that extra _oomph _on the not-so-uncommon chance that she needed to kick someone.

The blister pack with the last three pills was transferred into one of the pockets within the long coat, and she zipped up.

Stuffing her school bag into the space with the rest of her things, she stepped back to find Mysterion had just emerged from the space beneath the stairs, the clothes that constituted _Kenny _wadded up in his arms, and his school bag hanging off one shoulder.

She motioned him over, tucking his stuff away as well. She took a pause before shutting the door, looking at their things to make sure she wasn't forgetting anything stupid. She wasn't missing anything, was she? For some reason, she felt the urge to go through the pockets of her pants, feeling like she was light somewhere but not able to put her finger on it.

_My phone. I don't have my phone._

That was it- she felt naked without it... but there wasn't anything for that.

"Want my burner?" Mysterion offered. "It's a cheap prepaid piece of shit, but you could probably get _a _photo online with the data it's got left."

She blinked. She remembered that phone- it was how she found him after he'd been taken by Agent Russel, back around Halloween when they'd gotten the President to come to South Park for a one-on-one negotiation. That was the night she'd ensured the safety of her family from the government, and gotten access to the files that led to them investigating garages last Saturday. Those files had mentioned a project at a lab that had since been abandoned, the project known only by an ID code; P0069. The lab was supposedly somewhere in Park county; abandoned and lost.

The last information they got was from Kartwright; that a source had disappeared on her after finding a requisition order in relation to the supposedly discontinued project- evidence that someone was trying to _rebuild it. _

Was that information any good? Had it been a red herring? _Something _had happened at that garage that night, but Buttlord couldn't trust her memories.

She made a sharp nod. A single photo upload presented a number of options in her hands. She'd need to use it wisely. Mysterion fished the cheap mobile out of his own pocket and handed it over, and she tucked it into her own coat before finally closing and locking the cupboard.

Upstairs, the steps roaming about the house sounded closer. It was time to move.

"Ready?" She asked him softly.

She felt his hand slip into hers.

"Let's do this."

* * *

Bigger jumps were probably the most challenging trick in Buttlord's book. It wasn't like pauses, glitches, or short hops.

A pause was like grasping a moment and pinning it down, and it was probably the ability she used the most often- to the point that she could drag out the stops for almost a full thirty seconds of personal time before the clock started ticking again for others. It let her bypass hazards, like electricity and fire, and manipulate her environment to her advantage in an unseen instant. Glitches were... _touchy, _but useful. Glitching a broken object... or, most often, a broken _Mysterion/Kenny _back into an unbroken state was the most common use, but knowing what she _could _and _could not _glitch was weird and felt arbitrary. It was a power she got frustrated with, more often than not, and didn't always think of outside of undoing a mortal wound- for some reason, she was a lot better at knowing when it would work when she was in the middle of the action and acting on _instinct _over _active thought. _Finally, short hops were like pressing _fast forward _or _rewind, _watching the world move around her in whichever direction she'd picked while she didn't move an inch. How far she pushed things was a matter of finesse she had good days and bad days with, but she had an upper limit of about an hour without some kind of assistance... though she still didn't understand how the hell farting into a _fan _enabled her to push shit a full twelve hours and shift night into day while only personally experiencing that as a few seconds.

_Seriously, if I ever see Morgan Freeman again, I am going to grab him by his shirt collar and **shake him **until he explains how this bullshit works. _

Big jumps, however, were different. A big jump was different from a little hop in that her position in space as well as time could change, and without complete self-confidence she could entirely miss the mark of where and when she was aiming to go. Depending on how rattled she was, how unsure or panicked, it was entirely possible for her to go right past a target of a few days and end up _two weeks and 20 miles _off the mark. And, like glitches, the rules of exactly _what happened _seemed somewhat arbitrary and hard to get a handle on. Sometimes she duplicated; arriving at the chosen point in time as her subjectively present self- separate from whatever other version of herself existed at the time. Other times it was more like a shift of her consciousness up and down the timeline, becoming aware as herself at the target point in time in already existing flesh.

Jumping more than a day seemed to increase the chance of duplication, and a fast was to near guaranteeit was to change clothes or have specific objects or people she was trying to bring with her. The bigger the jump, the more likely it was that there would be two versions of her running around; the original who existed in that time, and the one who had come back, or forward, to do something.

_Forward hops were the worst. _She had only hopped into her future on accident. Knowing that it was malleable, knowing that futures she'd seen could change depending on events in the present or past, made her feel like she was losing touch with time entirely. What was the _present, _anyway, if she could just _move about _at will? What stopped her from going to the future and _making it _her present? She _hated _thinking about how easily she could just... _disengage _and quite literally travel time and space until she found a future she liked and just _stay there. _

It made her feel like her present moment didn't matter. Almost like it wasn't really real. _She hated that. _

Thankfully, they weren't going forward; they were going back... and she'd checked every possible box to guarantee duplication.

Holding Mysterion's hand, she knew she had this.

The smell was like something had crawled up her ass and died, with a cloud that both she and Mysterion attempted to waft away upon arrival. She'd kept them in the basement; it was a familiar location that she knew she could hit with minimal error. Trying to change locations, without having some idea of where she was going, usually meant she _magnetized _to wherever her past self was at the time... and she wanted to avoid an _encounter _if at all possible.

When she and her temporal duplicates ran into each other, it was almost _always _trouble. Like... irrationally try to beat the hell out of each other, trouble. Not _every _time- but often enough that she avoided it as a rule because _she didn't know what the hell the rule was that triggered that bullshit. _

_Again, _she thought very fondly of how she might interrogate Morgan Freeman if she ever ran into her time-fart mentor again. She'd never forgive him for skipping town without teaching her all the _particulars _of her ability and how fucking _weird _it could be.

"_Whoof... _damn that's shit's nasty right after you've taken your medicine." Mysterion commented. The basement was dark; the lights off and dim, diffused light coming from the narrow window above. "Got a way to check the time?"

She nodded, hurrying over to the work bench that was parked below the window. On the edge, near the corner where her elliptical machine sat [a space she mentally referred to as her _cardio corner], _was a shitty old laptop that never left the room because its battery couldn't hold a charge anymore. Flipping up the lid, she didn't even need to log in; the time and day was displayed on the lock screen.

_Saturday, 8:21 PM_

"Right on target." She affirmed. Her parents would be settling into bed at this time, and while her current version would already be on her way to the garage with Butters, she and Butters had _walked _to the garage. She and Mysterion would be able to beat them there, no problem.

Behind her, she could hear Mysterion mounting the stairs. She blinked, turning around and shooting him a quizzical look from across the room. Why was he going up through the house? They could just slip out the same way they'd slipped in- through the window.

"... your meds haven't been stolen yet, right?" He asked, sounding puzzled. "I figured you kept us here so we could grab more, just in case this trip is a bust."

She felt her face turn crimson, thankful for both the darkness and the mask. Yes, that _would _be the smart thing to do.

She didn't say anything, just hurrying to follow him up.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

And _that _is why they are partners XD

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	5. Second Verse Same as the First

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Second Verse Same as the First::**

After they'd collected a few extra sheets of Buttlord's medicine as a safety net, they had struck off at pace without much in the way of conversation. The trip to the garage was been uneventful. Night had fallen on South Park, and like any podunk little town there wasn't a lot of street lamps once you got off main street. Mysterion set pace, if only because if Buttlord did she'd push things up into a flat-out run without thinking about it. Keeping him in front prevented her from getting caught up and burning herself out... seeing as neither of them knew if they were going to need to dig deep later.

They had no idea what they were going to find, or what it would mean.

_Flexibility _would be key, Mysterion felt. Whatever happened, they just needed to be ready to adapt.

Buttlord grasped him by the elbow as they got close to the garage, tugging him onto an alternate path that would go around the back of the building by way of leaving the road and the sidewalk that ran along it. At first he was unsure of why she was being so cautious, but in peering further up the way and squinting a little... he could spy figures ahead of them on the main path, and catch the faint wisps of a familiar voice over the snow-covered distance.

_Butters, _talking to Alyssa as the two of them were on their way to investigate one of the three garages that had ended up on their suspect list, unaware of how their night was about to get complicated. The original instance of this night, running its course.

The fact that they caught up was a point in their favor. Now it was time to get just a touch _ahead. _

The pair of them ducked away from the street, behind a neighboring stone building and into the gated rear yard of some kind of junk area or chop shop; forgotten vehicles stripped down to their bones left to steadily rot, and one of which made useful in climbing up and over the fence that bordered their destination. On the approach, Mysterion was assessing the building- the shape and build of the garage suggested the building had originally been a sort of warehouse, re-purposed for machine work. Metal siding, weather-beaten and probably poorly insulated, with a stone foundation that peeked up above the snow line. The tall profile of the place meant that sounds inside the garage itself would be prone to echoing; metal walls loved to carry every little noise, and concrete floors were difficult to move silently on.

Once they were inside, particularly with a hostile present, they were going to need to be _very _careful to prevent discovery... and decisive if they decided to engage. There would be no space for second guessing.

He glanced behind him, making a motion for Buttlord to take the lead, as she'd been here before. It was harder to read her face in the hard mask she wore, but the tight flat line of her mouth suggested she was tense.

Of course she was. This wasn't her kind of mission. She was a human wrecking ball. Investigation was _his_ bag.

"Got any ideas on what to do once we're in there?" She asked him lowly, taking the lead as bidden and managing to contain herself to a jog as she made her way along the back edge of the building.

That was a question he'd been processing the entire way over. The more he considered it, the more he knew there were a host of variables that made detailed planning a poor proposition... but he had a general idea for a course of action. Keeping pace with her, and taking only a moment to collect himself, he answered. "Stow away in the vehicle, if possible. Whoever this person is, whether it's Kartwright or not, they don't have the machine up and running yet. Assuming they're going to take it straight to the lab, this might be the best time to _break _it before it can be used."

_We don't know what the machine does, but based on the stuff Miss Reynolds said about it before she was taken away...? Nothing good. Not to powered people, anyhow._

Alyssa came up to the corner of the building, stopping hard there and carefully peering around it. She was quiet for a moment as he stopped behind her.

Something in her posture... he could tell, she was scared. She'd been scared since the incident with Amelia, since they'd found out about the existence of the machine, and gotten the documents on her parents. Someone had tried _very _hard to get her and her family to that lab when she'd been a baby, and tried even harder to bring them in for the years since the escape. To her, he imagined, this felt like confronting all the nightmares at once.

"_It feels like it can't be that simple." _She mumbled, more to herself than to him.

He reached out, gently putting a hand on her back. Her head twisted, and she looked at him with wide eyes.

"Is it ever?" He asked, putting on a lopsided smirk.

That got her to scoff. _No, not it wasn't. Not even once. _

With a nod, she made a motion that they were safe to come around the corner. Now on the far side of the building from where they approached, he could see that this area was a rough parking lot that led right up to a big bay door connected to an electrical box that would open it when a key was inserted and a button was pressed. There was no key present in the box at the moment, but the faint dusting of snow on nearly every surface was absent on the box, suggesting it had been accessed recently. In that same powder coat of snow was a set of tire tracks that came up through the empty side lot, right up to the door, and a set of prints that looked like they'd exited the vehicle, come up to the button box, and gone back- the recent evidence of someone having entered the building with a vehicle.

That meant their bogey was in there right now, and _past Alyssa _would be entering soon.

Next to the big bay door was a smaller door meant for direct entry to the garage from the side- probably for employees of the place to come out and guide in people with vehicles or large trailers without getting in the way of the same; a quick inspection of which revealed that while it was locked, it was _not _linked into a security system... and Mysterion was hardly bothered by locks these days.

Some fiddling and a pin later, there was a faint _click _from the side door.

"We're in."

* * *

Buttlord's sense of _d__éjà vu_had taken a turn for the surreal. There was a memory echo of this place playing about in her mind, but it was from a distinctly different perspective. Slipping through the door with Mysterion, with him lagging a step behind her to close it without so much as a _snick _of the latch going back into place, she was brought back to the smells of machine oil, gasoline, and steel... but her perspective was not that of the entryway from the lobby, where she and Butters would attempt entry momentarily. She felt almost like she was standing in both places at once; at this side entrance where she could clearly see the white truck, _and _at the dual swinging doors from the lobby where she'd spied the shadow of a stranger in the yellow beam of a work light.

Blinking did away with the after-image, and she realized she had a different angle on that person, now. They were in the corner at the other end of the building, the yellow work-light shining upwards and into that corner from a floor placement. Where on the original run of this night, she had seen nothing but a distorted shadow of someone, the figure was in her direct line of sight this time; standing in the beam and clear as day to see.

_It wasn't Kartwright._

At distance, Buttlord could surmise a few things quickly; that the woman standing in the light of the work light was older; at _least _past fifty, and wore a long tan jacket with a black hat made of some kind of wooly or knit material. She stood in near perfect profile to the door at that second, exposing deep stress lines to dark shadows as she wore a serious look, appearing like she was double checking the area to ensure nothing were being left behind, with heeled shoes that clicked upon the floor as she turned her back and wandered further in the space whilst her head quested left and right.

Once Mysterion had the door closed, she reached for him and pulled him towards the truck to use it as cover. She knew that very soon that work light was going to go out, and the woman was going to start making her way towards the truck.

_The woman. A stranger. **Not Kartwright. It's not Kartwright- **so why do I **remember **it being Kartwright?_

He didn't fight her, the pair of them moving the few steps needed to crouch low before the front bumper of the white truck she remembered- moving deliberately as to minimize the sound of their own footfalls as the arrived.

The truck was big- a heavy duty sort of machine that probably could have towed a mobile home with minimal fuss... and the four-door cab was pitched mildly upwards by the weight that was currently secured in the back bed. _The machine _was back there, right now, strapped up and ready to move, probably assisted into place by the heavy duty hoists that rode overhead tracks that crisscrossed this entire space.

She still remembered those things- her face in particular knew she'd slammed into one, no matter how muddy the memories of this night were.

The beam of the work light went out on the far side of the garage, and there was the steps she remembered so well. The purposeful gait of the woman in the dark, making her way back to the truck. Mysterion made a motion like this was his chance, but she maintained her grasp on his arm to prevent him from moving; this wasn't their moment yet.

No, of the few things she could put together, she knew there was going to be a great cacophony of noise- a gunshot, and a shattered skylight. _That _would be the moment for them to slip into the truck and hide, riding along to wherever this person was taking the machine.

_But who is she? Why did she frame Kartwright? **How **did she frame Kartwright? _

At the other end of the truck, there was a flash of light- like a camera flash. It made her blink.

_I took a picture? I don't remember taking a picture... Even if I don't remember, my phone needs a fingerprint to unlock, so either I had to delete it, or..._

A terrible feeling was sinking into her stomach. The steps abruptly stopped, no doubt seeing that flash as well and realizing that she was not alone in this space.

In the dark, the stranger let out a chuckle.

"Should have known... but you're _early, little Lyssie." _

The words were measured, with a cold quality that carefully pronounced each word with a distinct and knowing punctuation. Aware of the impact they'd have... and possibly _unaware _at the same time, as it wasn't just a previous version of herself that froze in place, hearing a familiar nickname come out of a stranger's mouth.

No, it froze the current version of her, too. Her hand gripped tighter around Mysterion's arm; not to restrain him, but because something horrible had struck home in her head. Everything came together, and the answer to her questions made her mouth go dry. Those words, that nickname, and the memory of who had said it-

It felt like getting punched in the gut.

The missing medicine. Her muddled memories. The sense that she hadn't been acting like herself after this encounter, avoiding conflict when she normally would have brought the war to any suspected party after getting a _literal _bloody nose... and, very possibly, why her unknown antagonist hadn't shot her dead when she'd clearly had the opportunity to do so.

_It's me. It's an older version of me.  
_

"It's a special surprise." The voice in the dark continued. "And you _nearly ruined it- _but that's okay. I have a treat for you."

There was another sound. That of a gun hammer cocking back. It was the only thing that prevented her from getting utterly buried in her own head, familiarity with that sound instantly putting her revelation to the back of her mind and reminding her of the task at hand. The grasp she'd been using to hold Mysterion back was now used to urge him forward; around the side of the truck to continue on with their plan.

The gunshot cracked through the air, and the skylight shattered. The sound made her ears ring, and she instinctively flinched despite knowing it was coming. Hands that had just released Mysterion came down to the floor for a second, and she forced her eyes closed as a way of getting her head back together while she drug in a deep inhale. She remembered what she'd done at this moment; the _ball _she'd curled herself up into to protect herself from falling glass. Her body wanted to do it again; follow the memory echo and curl up into a ball, even though she wasn't in the line of fire this time. It took a moment to fight back, and then follow after Mysterion the second after.

Shards of glass chimed sweetly for a second as Mysterion crept up along side the cab of the truck, poking his head up to check where their enemy is while one hand rested on the handle to open the driver's side passenger door of the cab. Then, in horrible unison, those shards struck the concrete floor with a force that felt like it stabbed into one's ears.

Beyond the truck, there were heavy footfalls; Buttlord could recognize them as her own. Her heavy boots, making a mad sprint for escape as fear took over and she chose to retreat before the next bullet got planted in her brain. There were loud crashes as she went; no doubt slamming into everything between herself and the door... and bruises she had from that mad run seemed to ache in sympathy with every hit. Something got knocked over.

Mysterion, assured they were not being watched, opened the passenger door and passed into the truck's cab, quick fingers turning off the automatic light before it reached full brightness with the tap at the button on the roof. A step behind him, she could see there were supplies on the back seat for securing cargo; an extra tarp, securing tethers with heavy metal hooks, and thick moving blankets that were meant to pad cargo while in transit. It appeared the woman in the dark had come prepared with everything she'd need to secure the machine, deciding on overkill to ensure she'd not be caught short... which created an abundance of _stuff _for Mysterion to hide under without hesitation; burrowing in along the floor space.

Buttlord had been on the verge of following him, but a voice cried out from beyond the truck.

"_Hold still!" _

It was a command, belted out with certainty.

The haze cleared from Buttlord's memory.

She knew this moment. She knew when her joints froze mid-run, and she crashed to the floor without the ability to recover or save sensitive parts of her body from impact.

She remembered her face hitting the floor.

_That's _what split her lip. She didn't run into a hoist hook. _She'd crashed face first into the concrete floor after her body had frozen on her, commanded by a voice that had learned exactly how to use the power she'd been fumbling with in the past months. _

Hand on the door, but not yet in the motion of stepping up into the cab, she was frozen again. Trapped in place, more certain than ever that the thought she'd had before was right.

The stranger in the dark was her. Some future version of her, back in the past for some reason... and messing with this machine? _Why? What was she doing with it? _

_**Why did she frame Kartwright? **_

She could hear those heeled footfalls again; approaching the place where her past self crash landed. In the dark, she tutted.

"Always a little _bruiser, _hmm? I guess some things never change." She observed. "We weren't supposed to meet yet... not yet, _Little Lyssie... _It's okay, I promise- it's all going to be okay. _I'm going to make it okay- _but you have to wait a little longer."

She remembered these words; rediscovered them seconds before they were said again- but Buttlord's mind was racing ahead of that. She remembered struggling.

_She remembered resisting. She remembered breaking down the sense of invisible hands holding her down, and breaking free of them a little bit at a time. _

Her teeth grit together, and she focused on her feet. Just one foot, in fact. Maybe her toes, first- a place to put her entire mind against the command to hold still, and force them to wiggle within her shoes.

At first it felt as if she were trying to lift a building with nothing more than the knuckles of her toes... then she managed to flex them up, then curl them down. The rest of her foot followed, sliding along the concrete, and then it was like her entire body broke free- a minor rebellion cascading into a full break of the hold.

Able to move again, she peered into the cab of the truck. Mysterion's shape beneath all the packing stuff shifted, until his head could peek out to look at her, staring with wide eyes that might had pleaded with her to _hurry up and get hidden._

"Nearly got away with a picture. I'm afraid we can't have that, Lyssie... Wendy would go and unravel everything just a _little _too soon, smart girl that she is, and we'd have to do this whole dance over again... I don't know how many tries I have left to get this _right." _

_How many tries- what is she trying to get right? I got a photo, and she deleted it- what was in it that Wendy could use?_

It hit her like a ton of bricks. She looked at Mysterion- no, _Kenny, Kenny looking at her and begging her to hurry up and hide with him-_

_I can't. _She realized. _If she sees us- if she sees __**me, **__she's going to know I went back somehow. That she missed one of my stashes- if she's me, she knows my tricks. She might have even stolen the medicine for her own use. _

_**I need to go a different direction.**_

Her grip on the door changed, and she pushed it closed.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

As we revisit the scene that blew everyone's brains in the last story... :D

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	6. Past Wendy, Future Dee

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Past Wendy, Future Dee::**

"And now... I suppose I'll have to tell you a _story. _Something to remember instead of all this- that was your mistake with the last agent you dealt with, by the by. You made him _forget _something, but didn't give him anything to _remember_ instead. Causes delirium, every time. Brains _hate _it."

Buttlord was only listening to her future self speak because she had to carefully measure her steps to remain hidden. The concrete floor was not a muffling surface, and the last thing she wanted to do was _trip _and draw attention to herself. She needed to do what her past self had failed to do; take a photo and _escape _with it.

The phone borrowed to her by Kenny was a cheap off-brand piece of shit, but it still had a camera with a passable night mode on it. She ensured the flash was off as she slunk her way to the rear of the truck, lined up a shot similar to the one she would have gotten from her hiding place off the other side of the bumper when she'd tried this the first time, and snapped the photo.

In silence and darkness, she secured an image of the white truck and its tarp-covered cargo, all while the woman continued on.

"They're gluttons for information. They try to fill in empty spaces on their own if you don't give them anything to work with... _badly." _

With the picture secured, Buttlord knew what the next step was... and sadly it wasn't join her partner. No, she needed to get out of here. In a few seconds that older version of herself was going to unleash a potent priming noise- something refined and nearly impossible to ignore, and she needed to be _gone _and on her way before that happened.

The fact that the truck hadn't opened again at least gave her the assurance that Kenny trusted her enough to assume she knew what she was doing... or that he was more afraid of getting noticed than making sure she stuck of the plan.

Hopefully they'd get a chance to talk about it later.

In the dark, she heard herself, her previous self, make a frustrated noise as she fought the force that had pinned her down and held her still. A noise that eventually culminated in a loud and clear shout.

"_FUCK YOU!" _

Buttlord's gentle, careful steps had made it past the truck and back to the side door she and Mysterion had entered through, gently easing the handle as she listened to the sound of her previous self desperately lashing out. She remembered how angry she felt, the burning _need _to fight back and do damage.

What she'd forgotten in that rage was what was said to her before the priming noise.

"_Just like the doctor- _resistant, but not immune."

She'd forgotten those words. She'd been too wound up; a mixture of terrified and full of rage.

Slipping out the door, she repeated them in her head.

_Just like the doctor. Doctor Kartwright? What's her part in all this? _

The door shut behind her as that screaming sound rang out. Thankfully, with a wall between her and it, she had a chance to _run, _to escape the voice that would command her to forget what happened here and remember something else. She was able to put her head down and dash away, back around the corner of the building to sprint back towards town as fast as she possibly could.

_Next stop, Wendy's house._

* * *

Wendy didn't realize how late it got after Stan fixed up her arm. That was the fun thing with adrenaline; it messed up one's personal sense of time, slowing fast moments down and speeding slow moments up... and, honestly, after escaping whatever that _thing _had been with her life? Getting home to an angry lecture from her parents and a grounding was a far cry from the worst thing that could have happened tonight.

It actually felt somewhat surreal to arrive back in her bedroom; to realize that the last couple hours had been a _real _experience and not a manic dream. Once it sunk in that all of that had _happened _and, more to the point, _she'd survived it? _She crashed face-first into her bed, relishing the soft material under her body and feeling like she could have passed out right then and there.

She couldn't, of course. The moment she closed her eyes, she remembered the purple gaze of that mechanical monster. Grounded meant she'd be pinned at home when she wasn't at school or with the family, but that didn't mean she was _useless- _she could get on her computer and pull a late night figuring out what the fuck that thing was, and how it was connected to the pizzeria. Stan was meeting up with the guys tonight, but she was clever. If she turned up anything worth knowing, she knew a few ways to sneak information out...

_Just an hour or two- I'm sure I can find something worthwhile before exhaustion sets in._

With a sigh, she pushed herself up and off of her bed spread with her good arm.

She heard a _thud._

It was a small, muffled noise... but she started anyway, brain twisting away from possible research to searching the dim of her room with the lights off. She didn't _see _anything- where had the noise come from?

Her closet. She was sure of it. There was another sound; another shift from beyond the door to the space where she hung up her clothes and kept her personal things carefully stored and organized.

_Something was in her closet._

The memory was fresh; the mechanical monster with the purple eyes. It was irrational to think it had tracked her back to her home, but she'd seen enough horror movies for her imagination to go straight there. Glancing left and right, eyes landed upon her reinforced selfie stick that was part of the Call Girl setup- it was laying out on her desk, atop some loose leaf paper that was part of the investigation into P0069 she'd been doing for the team. Grabbing it, she felt more assured as she gingerly approached the closet on silent steps...

The knob began to turn before she could reach out for it. She backed up a step, and crouched into a ready position; either to _run _or _attack, _depending on what came out.

The closet door cracked a few inches, and she found herself disarmed.

"-_Buttlord?" _

She'd know that costume anywhere... but how had she gotten into her room? Her parents had been awake and waiting up for her in the living room, so the front door was out... maybe the back door? That entered the house through the kitchen, and presumably if her parents were distracted Buttlord would have been able to get upstairs without being noticed... but she had her own garage to search tonight. How had she gotten back to town, changed, and beaten Wendy home?

Something didn't add up. Buttlord didn't suit up for no reason.

Relaxing out of attack posture, Wendy hurried to her bedside to flick on a shaded lamp, providing some diffused yellow light as Buttlord finished coming out of the closet, feeling only _mildly embarrassed_ of the conspiracy wall that was her _entire bedroom. _She'd shown Buttlord pictures of some of it on Thanksgiving, but that didn't really capture how her entire bedroom had been taking over by this specific puzzle and digging for its solution. She'd been doing a ton of late nights... probably a bad choice for her health, all things considered. It was only a matter of time before she ended up with the flu or something because exhaustion weakened her immune system; particularly with the latest stresses piled on top.

"What are you doing here? You and Butters... did everything go okay?"

Buttlord hesitated, eyes looking towards Wendy's door.

"Oh- mom and dad's room is up the hall." Wendy informed, guessing that she was trying to figure out whether or not it was safe for her to use her voice in this space. "They shouldn't be able to hear you so long as you keep it low."

"... right." She whispered lowly, reaching up to push back her hood and relocating her hard mask to atop her head; briefly parting the veil on the identity of Buttlord to just be _Dee _for a while. Wendy noticed, right away, that her face was messed up... but it wasn't fresh. Her face was bruised and she had a split lip, but it wasn't something that happened an hour ago- more like a day or so ago...

"_You jumped back!" _Wendy gaped, eyebrows shooting up. "... oh God, don't tell me this whole thing with the Pizzeria..."

Dee blinked, her head experiencing a little shake like a localized shiver- a physical show of her brain shifting gears- before a faint frown carved into her face. "Oh, that shit... no, that... I mean, _everyone gets out alive, _so... I don't really want to mess with that, in case the alternative is worse. No, this is about the person pulling the strings on the abandoned lab."

Wendy nodded slightly, accepting that information. It wasn't exactly... _encouraging _the way Dee phrased it, but at least everyone would make it to the other side. She'd leave it at that; they learned the hard way a long time ago that _re-doing _things trying to get a better outcome was a serious _guess and check _proposition, and if the current outcome of a timeline was _acceptable, _it was generally best not to mess with it.

_Generally. _They'd learned that trying to undo the bombing of Canada, and the amount of _go back and try it again _that went down with that mess created so many memory echos Wendy still wasn't entirely sure what _actually _happened. She still got the occasional nightmare of some of the alternate timelines that she'd experienced with Buttlord and Mysterion trying to undo something so huge and destructive... and many of them were much uglier. Timelines where a new World War had broken out, or where the Nuclear apocalypse had already happened and South Park was a burned out little patch of scavengers and mutants... or where the town didn't exist at all.

When one started playing with the cascades that went into big happenings, you learned pretty fast just how many different ways the dominoes could fall... and started to feel pretty lucky that fate rarely fell upon the worst outcomes as a default.

"... you came back to tonight, so I'm guessing you had an _encounter _at the garage that needed to be revisited." Wendy hypothesized.

Dee nodded slightly, taking the opportunity to sit on the edge of Wendy's bed. "I... I think I know whose behind this shit, and it's not Kartwright." Dee paused, seeming to double check her thought process before she needed to herself. "_It's me." _

Wendy blinked. _"You? _What do you mean? Like..." Her mind spun off into a new idea, but Dee shot her a look that told her to _shut up _and give her a second to gather her words. Wendy's teeth clicked together as she hastily got ahold of herself, nodding for Dee to take her time.

"Not _me, _me. A future version of me. Older; fifty or sixty, I didn't get a close look at her... But the first time I did tonight, the way it went down is I ended up going in alone, and ran into her, and she _commanded _me. She had priming noises on her phone, and she knew exactly how to do it. She talked like she had experience. The me that exists at this point in time? She's forgotten who she ran into, and thinks she ran into Kartwright, and that's what she told Butters, and what Butters is going to tell the others... but the memory felt wrong the day after. That's why me and Mysterion came back. I needed to know what really happened, and..." She took a deep breath. It sounded like she was still processing it.

It was also worth noting that Mysterion was _not here._

"What she said. What she's done... what she's _going to do- _it's the only explanation that makes sense. She's _me- _I have no idea why she's here in the past, fucking with that lab or that machine, but it's the only fucking thing that fits."

"... that means you're involved with the government in the future." Wendy noted.

That seemed to give Dee a jolt- a vector she'd not considered. "... how do you figure?"

"The requisition order that Kartwright found- the one that caused her source to disappear." Wendy reminded. "Someone with clearance had to have made the request. It wouldn't have gone anywhere if they weren't high enough on the ladder to know about the secret stuff. She might not just be a _future _you, but an _alternate _you- maybe one who never escaped government control."

Wendy felt bad putting the idea forward. Dee had been worn out and stressed since the whole _Amelia _incident. She could tell she'd just given her friend one more thing to be paranoid about.

There was a moment of silence before Dee violently shook her head. "_Ugh, _there's no time for speculation right now. Point is, _she has the machine- _it was at the garage, she took it away in a truck. Mysterion stowed away in the vehicle- I got a picture of it I wanted you to take a look at. My original instance tried to escape with a photo, but _old bitch me_ deleted it- said you'd unravel everything if I managed to get it to you."

"Why didn't you say so?!" Wendy's voice almost rose, but she managed to contain herself to an anxious hiss. Dee winced, producing a phone that... wasn't hers. Wendy wouldn't ask, accepting the device and checking its USB connection before hurrying over to her computer desk to hunt up the correct cord and plug it in for a file transfer. She realized very quickly that the phone belonged to Kenny upon opening the DCIM folder for the camera. Aside from the latest photo, which was a low light shot of a heavy duty truck with something in the back bed, the rest were... well, of an adult nature.

"Oh, hey, I sent him the links for some of these..."

Wendy's head twisted to find Dee perched at the side of her office chair, a faint sound of disgust caught in her throat. "_You look at this stuff?" _

"What's wrong with titties?" Dee quested dryly, giving Wendy a wry smirk despite the intensity of the evening.

"N-nothing, I just... _I thought you had more appreciation for natural breasts, is all." _

Dee scoffed. "Sure I do, you just don't see 'em often in freebie porn- you get what the broadest audience likes, and _white manboys _like hairless silicone. My favorite stuff is _exhibitionists, _but ever since the porn purge on Tumblr..."

"_Forget I said anything!" _Wendy nearly yelped, feeling her cheeks turn red as she selected the only image that didn't feature any nudity, porting it over to PhotoShop in case she needed to apply any filters to see what there was to see. _"Jesus." _

"Oh, right... do you have Kartwright's contact information on your phone?" Dee quested.

"Huh?" Wendy glanced up. "Yeah, why?"

"Stuff was said that makes me think..." Dee trailed, making a face. "I want to try to get ahold of her, and my phone is gone. If that's okay?"

Wendy nodded, fishing into her pants pocket and pulling out her smartphone to hand it over. "Make sure you're connected to the house's secured wifi."

"Got it."

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

And we have another double chapter day! _WOO!_

Things have been so serious, it felt good to sneak a little levity in there XD Thank you Kenny.

Wonder how he's doing... :3

_**-Buttlord**_


	7. Temporal Circle-Jerk

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Temporal Circle-Jerk::**

There was an intense feeling of anxiety as Dee made the call. The fact that her... _future self _had implicated Kartwright, and mentioned 'the doctor' as being resistant... it sent her down a train of thought that made her head fucking hurt along with the consecutive knots her guts had formed themselves into. She wasn't suspicious of the CDC agent anymore- tonight appeared to acquit her of concerns that she'd been working against the team. Instead, she'd been framed, her position becoming that of a scapegoat... but _why? _

There were still missing pieces of this puzzle, the full picture still maddeningly unclear, even as key features emerged.

Dee chewed on the inside of her cheek as the phone rang, idly pacing back and forth in the space between Wendy's computer desk and the foot of her bed.

_Ringing, ringing, ringing..._

"_Hello, you've reached the mobile phone of Dr. Haley Kartwright. I can't answer my phone right now, so please leave your name, number, and reason for calling after the beep..." _

Dee cursed, hanging up before leaving a message, fighting the urge to throw Wendy's phone. _The one time I actually wanna hear that bitch's voice and she's off the cuntlicking radar. What the fuck is this shit?!_

"No luck?" Wendy asked, not turning away from her own work at her computer.

"No." Dee confirmed, managing to take a deep breath and shake some of the tension out of herself before returning to Wendy's side, placing her phone on the surface of the desk. "Rang off and went to message... what about you? Find anything good?"

"Doing some digging- your photo got the license plate, and following that I found that the truck is a rental from U-STOR-IT, picked up yesterday and due back tomorrow. Nothing surprising, but it was attached to a name and a Colorado license; _Marie Verankert, _age sixty-two, with a Denver PO box for the address. It'll take time to get anything more than that, and I have no idea what I could possibly figure out about the machine from a _shape under a tarp..." _Wendy shrugged. "Sorry it's nothing _mind blowing." _

_Marie Verankert. _Dee logged the name in her own head. It didn't have any meaning to her. The surname sounded German. "Can I see the license picture?" Dee quested after a beat of thought.

Wendy shrugged, pulling up the image. It was snatched from the U-STOR-IT server; a scan of the license against white paper as part of record keeping in case a client decided to disappear with a vehicle. As a scan, it wasn't of the best quality, but it gave Dee a clear look at Marie's face.

_It was uncanny._

"I guess she does kinda look like you... similar shape of the jaw." Wendy mused, leaning close to the DMV photo of a pale skinned woman in her sixties, staring blankly at the camera while short-cropped curls of graying brown hair sat in strange directions that suggested a hat had recently been removed. The colors were dull, but the data on the card noted her eye color as green. "The nose, too. But she's got these _serious glare lines _around her eyes, like she's always angry or stressed out..."

"She looks like Kartwright."

Dee felt numb. It was a fresh shock, one that left her skin slightly tingly as a line was connected between herself, Kartwright, and this _Verankert _identity. She could see it now; similarity she'd been blind to because _no one _looked like their teen pictures, and no teen saw themselves in adult faces... but it was just like Wendy said. The shape of the jaw, the nose, the eyes- and the more she looked, the more she saw it. The rounded shape of her eyebrows, the distinct shade of her natural brown hair color beneath the dye; these things were present in Verankert's picture, and Kartwright's own face.

_There's three of us._

Wendy's head wrenched around, staring silently for a second. "... _oh God..." _

Wendy's phone buzzed; the single pulse of a text message. Dee remained frozen as Wendy recovered enough to reach across and check it.

"... Dee, uh... _I think it's for you?" _

Reaching out for the offered device felt like moving through sludge. A new piece had fallen into place, but the whole picture still refused to come together. She'd interacted with Kartwright! There had been no urge towards murder, and Kartwright certainly hadn't said anything that suggested she was at all familiar with time travel-

_Are her and Verankert playing with us? Is this one big distraction tactic? Did Verankert specifically mention Wendy **knowing **I'd be in the room and go down this road? _

Paranoia was winding her up again. She swallowed, and looked down at the message on Wendy's phone. It was from a number she didn't know right off the top of her head, though the area code was correct for South Park.

[Received, 10:58] Kartwright's phone is compromised. Jump back, go to the cabin at 5:30 PM. Wait around the back until the truck leaves. You'll know what to do.

[Received, 10:59] Kenny's Burner Settings About Phone

The pair of messages were short, to the point, and... vague. _You'll know what to do _was never a comforting message, but the direction to _jump back _meant the message was doubtlessly for her. The chain below it, however, confused her for a second... but Wendy was already on it. She had Kenny's burner phone in her hands, tapping her way to the settings menu and then scrolling all the way down to the 'about phone' panel... which listed the phone number.

It was the phone number these text messages were from.

These texts weren't just _for _her. They were _from _her.

_Satan's brimstone studded leathery ball sack, I **hate **time travel._

"Predestination paradox." Wendy deduced. "This... _all of this has already happened."_

"Which means I need to _not fuck it up." _Dee groaned aloud. She didn't like big jumps in general, but _loops _were possibly her least favorite type of time travel shenanigans, in part because conventional ideas of _cause and effect _got really fucking slippery in a hurry. "And figure out everything I need to do to close the circle of events... _fuck me running." _

She missed Kenny. He was better at adapting to this shit on the fly... but she had to trust she was going the right direction.

"I didn't tell you any of this was coming... So I'm guessing tomorrow's policy is _pretend I never saw you _if anyone asks." Wendy reasoned to herself. "... please tell me I don't have to keep a lid on this for long? Like... tomorrow, sure, but if I gotta go to school with everyone on Monday, with all of this stuff on my mind, I might burst..."

"You're gonna be sick, tomorrow." Dee reported, thinking ahead. "Actually... Wendy, how long would it take you to say... _whip up a credible bomb threat to get me and Kenny out of school and back to town on Monday morning?" _

Wendy blinked. The suggestion was one she took a second to consider before she answered. "Couple of hours, maybe, to make sure they actually sent you back to town instead of just parking the buses a few blocks away while waiting for the police to check it out... should I start working on that?"

"Top priority, along with anything you can get out of that photo." Dee nodded, handing back Wendy's phone and reaching out to take back Kenny's burner as Wendy disconnected it from her computer. "I'm... guessing you'll know when it's safe to talk about tonight to me and Kenny."

"Usually do." Wendy let out a light chuckle. "This stuff is _almost _getting to be old hat." She paused for a second, getting up from her office chair. Dee didn't expect it, but also didn't resist as Wendy wrapped her up in a tight hug. "Be careful, okay? … try not to make time fuck itself inside out."

_No promises. _The thought was sardonic, returning Wendy's hug and tightly squeezing her friend after she adjusted to the affection, nearly lifting the girl off her feet before letting her go.

Stepping back, she put the burner phone away and put her hard mask back over her face, followed by flipping up her hood.

Bracing for another jump, she closed her eyes on the image of Wendy waving goodbye to her.

* * *

Mysterion knew something was wrong when Buttlord hadn't joined him right away.

He didn't know what happened. Within the truck and underneath a pile of packing supplies, he hadn't been able to hear anything happening outside the cab clearly. He thought he heard someone, the stranger in the dark who was very much _not Kartwright _bark out something, but the words were a fuzzy mess through the walls of the truck, and the layers of padding he'd burrowed himself beneath as a hiding place so opportune it belonged in an Assassin's Creed game.

He held still, momentarily worried they'd been noticed. He strained to listen, but it didn't seem like the stranger's voice was getting any closer to the truck. Nothing was shouted. No threats were traded, and it didn't sound like Buttlord had moved at all.

Given a few seconds, he squirmed around to turn himself the other way. He'd gone in head first, and needed to pull a complete one-eighty to turn himself about and peek his head out from beneath the thick layer of cover.

What he saw was Buttlord with wide green eyes behind her mask, as if she'd just been slapped in the face. She'd just discovered or realized something; he could read it in her slack jawed expression. Something _big _had just slipped into place.

They made eye contact.

_Jesus Lyssie, don't just stand there like a deer in the headlights- hide!_

His pleading with her was silent, and appeared to have the opposite effect. Instead of diving in to conceal herself with him before either of them could be noticed... she closed the door.

_Reflex _demanded he follow after her. That he rip the truck door back open and stay with her for whatever she was doing. _Protect her _from whatever new truth she'd come to understand.

He swallowed it back. She would have grabbed him and pulled him out if she needed him to go with her. They were _partners- _and he had his own mission to find out what was really going on at the lab... and possibly sabotage it. If she had another mission, and she trusted _him _to get his shit done? _He could trust her._

_Godspeed, Buttlord._

Kenny settled back beneath his insulating layer of packing materials, carefully ensuring that he was fully covered and finding a position in which he could remain perfectly still for a long time; settling on his side with his back against the base of the driver's seat. He could see nothing, trapped in complete darkness that was slowly getting uncomfortably warm with the inevitable buildup of stale breath and body heat... but he could stand it. Better than _hours _he'd spent in the Colorado cold on stakeouts, slowly going numb from the wind that always seemed sharper on rooftops. Sound was cut off, too; with all four doors of the cab closed, he was cut off from whatever the hell was happening outside.

The only sound that managed to cut through was something... _sharp- _high and loud, like microphone feedback. It was muffled, distant and quiet through all the layers between him and it, and it _still _made him feel like someone had tried to stab his brain through his ears with a sewing needle.

He knew that feeling. _That was a priming noise- _but not one of the glitchy rough ones that he, Wendy, and Alyssa had worked together on. No, this seemed... smoother, more refined, _more potent. _

… _don't tell me..._

The idea was insane, and yet it crept in at the edges of his mind as an off-the-wall hypothesis. The woman in the garage, the woman who was clearly _not Kartwright _but had somehow fucked Alyssa's memories to _frame _Kartwright-

_The hats! How the hell didn't I see it sooner?!_

Alyssa's black hat; lovingly crocheted by her mother for her when she'd been small... and so oversized that the thing still fit loose on her head at current. Kartwright had a black hat of some kind of knit or crochet make- and the woman here in the garage, too- _she had a black, woolen-looking hat _that he'd glanced at a distance before diving into the truck.

_But why? Why would there be **three **different versions of her in one time? Kartwright is a skeptic of Alyssa's powers- does she not remember? Is this other, older version controlling her? To what end? _

A theory to answer one question had spawned dozens more, and while it explained some, it revealed just how much he still didn't know.

He could hear something. The sharp click of heels; the steps of the older stranger walking along the concrete floor of the garage; around the tail of the truck and then past it, towards the big bay door. After a few seconds, a motor came on; the door was opening.

It was time to go.

Kenny held is breath as the driver's door opened. There was a jingle of keys, and the engine turned over. He thought they were on their way, but the truck stopped again a few feet later for the woman to get back out and close the garage behind her- a period in which Kenny felt his heart somewhere in his throat, mortified that he might be noticed.

He was resistant to the _obsessive _effect related to Alyssa's voice, but he had no idea how he'd react to a command. He wasn't sure he wanted to know... and the refinement of priming noises suggested this older version of Alyssa had been using her ability for a long time; perfecting her technique as well as her tools.

The driver returned, and this time he heard something key- the click of a seat belt being secured. The truck started moving again, bouncing over a rough parking lot before he felt it turn onto the main road. Engine noise increased as acceleration caused some of the heavier items for securing cargo to shift on the back seat, crinkling against the tarp.

No noise of alarm came from the woman driving. He let himself breathe.

"Did I wake you?"

At once, that breath froze in his lungs. The voice he heard was... well, it was mature. Lower than Alyssa's, but _puberty did things, _as did the march of time. The cadence was different, too; the way words were very carefully shaped. There was nothing hasty in the way she talked, but rather like each word was carefully measured as a sentence was crafted. It was a voice he couldn't imagine stuttering or stumbling.

"Good. I have it."

The pause, the response- _is she on the phone? _

"We had an encounter at the garage- _always meddling_. I've set up a few things that should delay her, but I'd consider our timetable accelerated. I want you to meet me there tonight to make sure we've got enough power."

_Definitely on the phone. _There? Was _there _the lab?

"_Stop whining- _you wanted things fixed, and this is how we fix them. You can sleep when you've got your _fancy house _and your _perfect family_ back in order."

_Who are you talking to? What did they want fixed? _Mysterion felt like he just might burst, gritting his teeth together as new ideas fired through his mind. This person had an associate with skin in the game, and they were trying to _fix _something- it sounded like they were trying to get something back; maybe a collapsed future timeline.

_Fucking with the past to fix the future- that's always a hard one to pull off correctly._

"See you there." Was the final curt words the woman in the driver's seat delivered, seeming to have persuaded whomever was on the other end of the line but apparently very annoyed by having to do so. To herself, she muttered; _"Shit sucking chlamydia soaked jizzrag _do you think _I _want to be awake this late _either? _We're running out of time..."

… _yep, that's Alyssa alright. _

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

TIME SHENANIGANS!

Also Kenny

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	8. This Might Be Fucking Familiar

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – This Might Be Fucking Familiar::**

Mysterion was keeping count of the seconds in his head as the truck traveled, the driver unaware of his presence. Every time he reached the number _60 _he tucked a finger in against his body, converting seconds into minutes and mentally logging as much as he could about the ride without being able to see where they were. Any information he'd be able to bring back about how fast they traveled, for how long, and on what quality of road would help him and Wendy deduce where the lab was later if he wasn't able to take decisive action tonight.

_Eight minutes at town speeds, lots of turns, then acceleration- smoother road, no potholes; the highway. Twenty two minutes, probably at speed limit, then a turn lane off the highway. Two minutes on rough road; unkempt or gravel, under twenty MPH, left turn, and then... _

The bouncing was distinct. Uneven land, and the truck slowing down to keep traction on a steady downhill slope. _They'd gone off road. _Or the road was so neglected it didn't get plowed out, at which point _it was as good as off road._

He'd never guess at Alyssa growing up to be such a cautious driver, but he had to assume the slow speed was for the benefit of the machine in the back bed of the truck; trying to prevent breakages in transit. She'd stressed on the phone-call that she was _running out of time, _which... seemed a strange phrase for someone he generally knew as _time travel enabled- _how could she run out of time? If this woman was the same person who stole Alyssa's medication, she obviously _knew _about the ability to hop back and forth.

Another thing to log and consider later; for now he continued counting. Another three minutes to get to the bottom of the hill, slowly and carefully descended with a four-wheel-drive.

The truck came to a stop. Mysterion heard it as the vehicle was put in park, and the driver stepped out- but she didn't shut the door behind her, and the truck let out a intermittent tone that reminded the driver that it was still running. He tried to listen past that, hearing the crunch of steps in snow cover that had formed a frosty layer of semi-solid snow on top that cracked like ice when stepped in. Those steps faded from earshot, and then he heard the rattle of metal against metal- _a chain? _Possible, followed by the screech of moving parts that were in desperate need of lubrication.

_A fence. She's opening a gate. _

He expected the steps to come back right after that, but they didn't. It was quiet for several moments as he was left alone of the _ding... ding... ding... _of the truck's warning system and the general rumble of the engine noise. Then, much more distant than the last noises he heard, there was a great _screeeeeeeeeee _followed by a solid _BOOM; _something heavy thudding down into the snow after moving on a set of forgotten and weather-worn hinges.

The steps came back a minute later, and the driver's door thudded shut before the truck got moving again. There was a faint bounce as the truck passed through the first barrier that had been opened, and then the world pitched downwards once more.

The quality of the engine noise changed. They'd entered a tunnel which reflected the sound back at them.

_They were going underground. _

* * *

For a second Buttlord was disoriented, blinking against the sting of her own gasses in her eyes and coughing faintly at the reek of rotten eggs and ocean shore at low tide. She'd gone from the dark and warmth of Wendy's room at night to the light and biting cold of standing outside on a Colorado afternoon in late autumn... but she was exactly where she wanted to be; standing on the narrow way that led to the cabin, just off of the highway and outside the closed gate that bore a sign reminding the public that the area beyond was private property.

She was kind of amazed that she'd managed to land where she wanted- she'd only been to the cabin twice, but her memories of the place were... _intense _to say the least. The first time she'd been on this road, she'd been in a stolen car with Cartman and Karen.

_Fucking jackrabbit orgy on a plane, that shit feels like it could have been a **year **ago... I am so tired._

The next question was had she arrived _when _she wanted to be there- something she was uncertain of. The burner phone borrowed from Kenny would still be counting time subjective to the period she'd taken it from; the original jump from her basement, and telling it to re-synchronize via the internet would waste precious pre-paid data... assuming she could even _get _data out here. All she knew was that the sun was up, but on its way down, creating a wintery sunset that was classic for the region, regardless of season.

Hurrying on, she ducked between the bars of the property gate and jogged along the road, where the snow had been packed down into a hard and icy layer by construction vehicles after the original cabin had burnt down and needed rebuilding. That was when Kartwright had started living out here, and brought the files from her parent's captivity with the Agency, but before then this place had been the hideout for Amelia Reynolds.

Remembering Amelia right now made her a little sick. If Verankert was involved with the Agency, it was reasonable to think she'd also been involved in Amelia's recapture after the _pussymech _incident that ended with the original cabin getting lit on fire and _exploding _as result of a gas leak. Dee had tried to talk to Amelia, understand what she was doing out here- she was a powered person with the ability to understand and control cats, and who had gathered the local feline population to search for something that they were _fairly certain _was the same abandoned lab their group was hunting. The woman had been broken in some way; not entirely there, speaking in fragments of thoughts and never quite coherent enough to get proper information out. When asked about what she was looking for, she had mentioned a _machine, _before muttering over and over again the same words;

_They tried to take it._

Buttlord really wished she'd had more time to _talk _with Amelia, but Cartman had ruined those chances in his usual way- by being a short sighted asshole who cared about nothing but the fact that _his _cat was among those missing. The moment he'd spotted Mister Kitty, he'd snatched the cat up and tried to ditch; an action that had _triggered _Amelia, who turned out to be sensitive to perceived theft of any kind.

The idea that a version of herself, _any _version of herself, had been somehow involved with Amelia's decent into madness, and forcing her to live out the last of her life under a government microscope, made her want to beat her head against a brick wall until such time as the wall or her skull gave in.

For now, she'd settle for just finding out why the hell she'd been directed to come here. Coming to the end of the road, she didn't see a truck currently in the driveway before the cabin; just Kartwright's rented black compact. There wasn't any lights on in the cabin, but she hadn't been told to go inside. No, she'd been told to _hide around the back, _so that's where she went; jogging for the side and ducking low as she came around the back of the rebuilt cabin.

The woods around the place still remembered the fire from the night the place had burned; blacked branches sporting no leaves or needles, with snow around their scorched trunks getting tainted with soot as it slowly wore away over time with the elements.

Buttlord stayed low, noting the rebuilt cabin had two windows on this face. She was nearly beneath one, which looked into the main living space if she remembered the layout correctly, the other lined up with the kitchen area. Curiously, she approached the window nearest to her and rose up just enough to try and peer through it. Her ability to see inside was limited, a set of thin white curtains hung up on the other side of the glass and drawn mostly closed, but there was a narrow silver of space through which she could see...

And there was Kartwright. The woman appeared to be in the process of escaping some heavy winter wear, like she'd just gotten in a few minutes ago, making Buttlord's timing possibly the most perfect thing she'd ever pulled off without meaning to.

Kartwright was struggling with a set of snow pants, her task made more difficult by a fluffy black cat she'd hefted high up on her shoulder, entirely concentrated on removing her outwear that she was utterly unaware that she was being watched. Eventually the straps of the overalls-style suit were undone, and the woman plopped her butt on the side of a futon that was immediately next to the front door of the cabin... and, consequently, out of Buttlord's current sight line.

_She's here. She's right fucking there- but the text said wait until the truck leaves. Verankert's truck? She's coming here? _

Buttlord crouched low again, passing beneath the first window and creeping further along to the second one. There, again, she carefully perked her head up to find yet another set of drawn curtains limiting just how much she could see within the cabin. There was an electric fireplace in her view from this angle, against the far wall and kitty-corner to a front-facing window that was- _surprise- _covered by curtains.

_Was Kartwright worried that she was being monitored? It's like she didn't feel safe, even all the way out here..._

Buttlord could relate, observing as Kartwright came into view, put something down in front of the faux fireplace, and then cast her body backwards; probably onto the futon, with her cat in her arms. She looked _exhausted- _like she'd just busted her ass and probably should have gone straight to sleep. Where had she been? Why had she been all dressed up in winter wear?

_Had she been searching the area on foot? Why didn't she ask any of us to help? Younger knees could probably cover more ground..._

Even as the thought occurred to her, she knew _exactly _why the woman hadn't asked for help. Assuming her stubborn nature was something that remained unchanged between instances of herself, there was no way in hell any version of her would ask for help with a task she considered _her job_ unless it was absolutely impossible to do it on her own... and even then, the other person would have to offer first, and persist past the first three to four times she said no out of reflex.

Against the silent backdrop of the snowy woods, Buttlord heard an engine that broke her out of her thoughts, making her duck low again as she strained to listen. There was also the sound of tires against the ground; a vehicle coming up the drive.

A set of headlights briefly cast their beams along the edge of the cabin, creating a long shadow before the turned towards the trees at the edge of the clearing and came to a stop. The engine cut, and there was a breath of silence before a door opened.

Buttlord had tucked herself against the wall of the cabin, putting her back to the building and focusing on what information she could gain with her ears while her eyes stared dully out at the woods off the back of the place. Muffled footsteps hit the snowpack of the drive, and there was sound of the cabin's front door swinging open.

"_Marie!" _Kartwright called out; Buttlord recognized her voice with a surreal amazement. Was that how she was going to sound in twenty years? The very idea of the transformation between her current state and that was one she struggled to comprehend, but there was more to this moment than just updating her mental picture of what she'd be like once she'd _matured. _No, _Kartwright knew Verankert- _that was a shout of a greeting, an _excited _one no less. "_What the **hell **are you doing out here?"_

"_Haley!" _Verankert's voice answered back; voices that bore disturbing similarity to one another when they contained the same warmth of greeting an old friend. But Marie was... _different, _in a strange way that Buttlord couldn't put her finger on right away. _"I could ask you the same thing." _Verankert laughed back at Kartwright. _"The stuffed shirts upstairs offer you a **month **anywhere you wanna go, and you pick **here? **What the hell is this...?"_

Marie's voice was lowering as she crossed closer to the door, and thus the person she was speaking to. Eventually they were no longer projecting loud enough for Buttlord to hear them, save for indistinct mumbles that barely made it around or through the walls. The clearest thing she could hear was the door closing.

Assured she'd not be seen, she leaned her head out around the corner of the cabin. Next to where Kartwright's black compact was parked, there was now a large white truck; the bed of which was empty. It appeared that Marie had come here before going to the garage... but why? How did she and Kartwright know each other? Again, a terrible sense of _paranoid worry _rose up in her brain, certain that the two women inside the cabin where plotting shit together and she, the youngest and possibly most helpless version out of the three of them, would almost certainly suffer for it. They were both _attached _to the government, after all- in all her life, had any member of the US government been trustworthy?

At the same time... the drawn curtains, the exhaustion, the image of a woman holding her cat at the end of the long day and looking about as wiped out as Buttlord had been feeling lately.

There was a sound within the cabin, louder than the muffled and indistinct words being passed back and forth. No, it was something high and sharp, so much so that it might have made the glass panes of the windows rattle in their frames. It stabbed into Buttlord's ears, making her hands reflexively slap over them as she went to her knees in the snow, knowing _full well _what it was.

_A priming noise- _one of the refined ones, like the one Verankert had used on her to alter her memory and behavior on the original run of this timeline.

The idea of Kartwright being involved in any _willing _collusion flew right out the window at that second, driven out as Buttlord's head throbbed in revulsion at the sound. A woman she'd greeted as a friend was manipulating her, at this second, priming her mind to be twisted with verbal commands-

Reflex suggested that she break the window and try to interrupt. Maybe if she caused enough of a shock she'd get a chance to shut Marie up before she managed to say anything... but she was primed, too. Busting in would give the old bitch _two _puppets to work with, _and _give away the game. No, she needed to do as she was told.

She needed to stay back here and wait until the truck left.

The sound ended. Silence returned to the snow-covered grove, and she removed her hands from her ears as she settled back on her butt rather than sitting on her knees. She strained to listen, to hear _anything _within the cabin... and while the words were still indistinct, she did detect the tone and cadence Marie had used at the garage; that cold and even voice she'd spoken with when issuing commands... and, considering she didn't hear Kartwright talking back, the woman cooperating. Things were quiet for several moments, and then there was the sharp bark of another command. This one was louder, and Buttlord felt it as it hit her, too;

"_Hold still!" _

The choice to remain behind the cabin was deprived of her. Now she was frozen; on her ass in the snow with her hands rested atop her knees, caught as she understood the words through the wall and instantly regretted trying to catch anything. It left her trying to fight it, using the same technique she had back at the garage; zeroing in focus on just one piece of herself to defy the order not to move.

She chose a hand this time, going from the hand as a whole to a finger, to a knuckle; specifically the one that would extend her middle finger, effectively attempting to _flip off the sky._

That idea was funny to her; giving the finger to the cloudy afternoon sky, like she could blame some kind of higher power for all this bullshit. Despite everything, she found herself with a laugh... and was surprised when, all at once, she didn't need to struggle. Her body was her own again, all with a humorous scoff on her lips. She hadn't had to _break _the control through sheer force of will... it was like her little internal giggle had driven it off.

… _welp, that's a thing to remember._

A gunshot slammed into her ears.

The sound jolted her, and her body curled down for fear of being in the line of fire. It was the second gunshot she'd been in close proximity to in recent hours, and she _swore _she was going to have severe hearing loss in the near future if shit kept on like this. The sound was humming in her brain as she rolled to one side, looking up and back to the kitchen window through which she'd been peering a little while ago.

The white curtain had been splattered with vital red.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner:: **

Kenny traverses into the belly of the beast, and Dee arrives back where we started... and discovers a neat trick.

BTW Y'all may have guessed at this point, but this story is gonna be _much _shorter than the last one. NKS was always meant to be _short _stories, so I'm trying to get back to the 40k to 50k range. IDK where this bitch will actually _land, _but if you feel like shit's going a lot faster than the last one... well, it is, in more way than one XD

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	9. For Once It Wasn't Kenny

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – For Once It Wasn't Kenny::**

Buttlord rolled herself back against the wall of the cabin, despite her brain going into _panic _mode. The gunshot, the blood- there'd been a heavy thud on the floor. A body? Adrenaline drenched her in sweat despite the cold of the snow beginning to cake onto her costume, thinking only of staying out of sight in case whomever was still standing decided to check a window.

It couldn't be Marie who had been shot- she was going to go on to the garage to secure the machine... but Kartwright was the younger of the two of them- if she'd been hurt, wouldn't that have _done _something to Marie?

_I hate this shit. I hate it so much. Time travel can eat my **entire** ass. _

The door of the cabin opened and closed. Footsteps crunched across the snow-pack, The engine of the truck started up, and tires rolled away.

She remained still until the sound of the engine receded entirely, leaving nothing but the silence of the cabin at twilight.

Slowly, carefully, she rolled herself back to her knees, and then got up to her feet, leaning on the wall slightly as she came around the corner to make her path come full circle around the building. Returning to the driveway, things looked very much the same as when she arrived. Just Kartwright's black compact, parked in the drive, with the packed down snow and dirt holding no memory of the truck that had just come and gone among heavier tire treads left behind by construction equipment. One could almost think the entire thing was imagined... if they wanted to be very foolish.

She hung around the last corner to arrive at the front of the cabin, and approach the door.

Within, a cat began to yowl. It was a sad sound; like the feline was crying.

She glanced back, out towards the narrow road that went into the woods, as if to make certain Verankert wasn't coming back... and then let herself in.

The cabin was very much as she remembered it from the last time she was here. The futon was folded down to act as a bed, as she'd seen from the window, but aside from that it was all pretty much the same. Cheap furnishings, piles of paper; nearly the entire room converted into work space outside of the corners in which one did occasionally need to sleep and eat.

Of course, there was one distinct difference this time.

There was a body on the floor.

Buttlord was no stranger to blood, gore, or death... but she never got used to seeing it. Every time, the way fresh blood just _soaked into everything _always disturbed her. The specific manner in which it splattered, and the way it dripped down were impossible to mistake, and always made her want to look away.

Doctor Haley Kartwright was collapsed on the floor, a pistol in her right hand, and a hole in her head. It appeared she'd been standing at the table that was furthest into the kitchen area when her body gave out, and the force of the shot had knocked her black hat from her head, allowing a splay of brown curls to cover her face. A big, fluffy black cat sat at her elbow, pawing at her, and letting out increasingly distressed meows.

The moment she saw it, she _felt _it. She looked at this moment, and knew something without knowing _how _she knew it.

_She knew she could undo it. _

It was exactly like the text said; _You'll know what to do._

Glitches were like short hops, but instead of rewinding a segment of _time, _it was the rewinding of a single _object- _or sometimes a few objects in concert. In the strange way that Buttlord could grasp a moment in her- her mind? No, this wasn't something she understood intellectually. This was a _feeling _of grasping a moment of time- but for a glitch it wasn't just a moment of time she held onto. No, it was a specific _shard _of time, subjective to the object or person she was rewinding.

She barely knew how to describe it to herself, much less anyone else- but when it felt right? It was the easiest thing in the world. Easy as breathing.

* * *

Haley had felt the bullet smash through her skull.

It was a terrible thing to remember; the sensation of something so tiny and so fast sending a blinding shock through the cranium. It was, as far as she could tell, the _last _thing she remembered physically feeling- perhaps she'd been _medically _alive for some seconds after that, but her brain had not been entirely aware of it. More likely than not any neurons that could have made sense of sensory information had been turned to jelly by the shock-wave. She knew nothing about that. Felt nothing about it.

She could still _hear, _however. Hear steps, hear a door, hear her _cat- _

_Ah, Princess... I'm sorry... don't cry like that. You're so far away... you gotta come here if you want me to love you. Where...?_

She couldn't move. She couldn't see. The meowing was getting more distant.

_Where are you, Princess? I'm sorry... I'm sorry..._

All at once, everything changed. Her senses came back, her sense of _smell _seeming to get the rudest greeting that woke the others up in turn. Horrible _rot _caught in her nose, like a sample of botulism given a vat of rotten meat to propagate within. She coughed, and she could both feel and hear it- she moved her hand to cover her mouth and heard a metal object drop to the floor-

_Her pistol. She'd dropped it._

Eyes flew open. She was standing in her rented cabin. Both of her hands flew to her head, finding it quite intact.

"_What the...?"_

"Hey."

A voice behind her; one she'd not heard for _months, _and it had been under weird circumstances back then, too... but this was weirder. _Much weirder. _Her head turned as if she'd been seized by the chin and yanked, still reeling from the phantom of a memory that was quickly fading into the ether.

At her feet, Princess's meows continued; _yowling _the way she did when she wanted to be let under the blanket during a thunderstorm to hide against Haley's stomach. She was such a mama's girl... and a _spoiled brat _who wouldn't climb under the blanket unless Haley woke up enough to lift it for her.

Behind her, she was faced with Dee- or _Buttlord, _she supposed, considering the costume. What was the kid doing here? _How had they gotten here? _… and where had Marie gone?

_Marie- _

"I... I just shot myself..." She gaped, numbly bending down to lift up her cat and hold the confused feline. She was rewarded with a vicious nuzzling that she barely registered. "A colleague of mine, she visited, and-"

"And she commanded you like I command people." The kid summarized. "Her name is Marie Verankert, right?"

The kid had information! And was serving her a _look _that seemed to be judging her every move. What the _hell _was going on?

"... yeah. Did you... just... _unkill me _with your _ass?" _

"It's a talent." The kid dismissed, pulling back the hard mask over their face and actually removing their overcoat- a garment near entirely caked in snow that was thawing within the cabin and becoming wet. "_We need to talk about Marie. _Who the hell is she? How do you know her?"

"Hold the fuck on for one _dick-sucking _second; I just had a _bullet farted out of my skull _and I'm still trying to catch up with that- just... just _gimmie a second..." _

She drifted as she requested a moment, returning to her futon. She let her body down on it, amazed to feel her own weight after a surreal moment where she'd perceived existing without it. She felt like she was going to have nightmares about this for a while, but that wasn't even the most extreme part of what happened. Marie had come in, revealed she knew something about P0069, played a noise from her phone, and then _controlled her like a voice operated robot _to write an incriminating suicide note and-

Her head shuddered atop her spine, making a noise of distaste in the back of her throat as the kid laid out their overcoat in front of the electric fireplace; no doubt hoping to dry out the long coat a bit before they had to put it back on. They were dressed in a sleeveless and sweats underneath, with the faint swell of possibly B cup breasts held back by a good sports bra being a bit of definition that Kartwright had never seen on previous encounters... then again, in previous encounters, the kid had always been layered up in baggy as clothing.

That felt weirdly nostalgic. Same as she felt about the snow- a well-worn memory she didn't actually remember; just a feeling about it.

The kid took a seat next to her. The cabin was quiet.

"I... uh- I was diagnosed with retrograde amnesia... uh... _fuck, _three, four years ago? That's the kind where old memories are gone- lotta shit can cause it, but I didn't have _anything. _I was told I'd been involved in an accident. Marie helped me rebuild my life after the diagnosis; saved me from being shipped to an institution, advocated for me, helped me keep appointments with the psyche boys_ long _after I wanted to give up. She was there when I jogged my first memory- picked up something from my old life; it was... _running. _Running like hell just for the fun of it, alongside a stream or some shit, laughing with a friend... but I couldn't remember their face."

What just happened cast that in a different light. The fact that Marie had been there from the very beginning- and every step after that until she started living and working on her own... was this the first time she'd been manipulated by the woman? Or was this just the latest move with all the subtly and pretense dropped, seeing as the goal had been _getting rid of her? _

The kid was quiet for a long time, processing with their lips pressed tightly together... and then their eyes widened. "Wait... so... you don't remember _anything _before the accident?" They asked.

"Not really... I pick up stuff every now and then- doctors say it's all still there, just gotta... rattle it loose, I guess? Most of what I've gotten back has been my education. It's how I got my job; turns out _whoever _I was before, I knew a thing or _twelve _about disease... though, Marie helped with that too, so... _maybe I don't." _

Had everything been a lie? Maybe it was all fake. Maybe she was an empty vessel, blasted clean by Marie's ability and made into whatever shape she needed-

_No. I can't believe that. I have to believe the things I've gotten back belong to me- they feel like they're mine. I need that to be true. _

"That... _shit- that doesn't add up." _

The kid got back to their feet, too tense to stay still.

Princess let out a demanding meow- apparently she'd gotten bored of _giving _affection to her newly revived mistress without getting any in return. Clumsily, Haley mastered a hang to stroke her down her back once, twice, before landing her hand on the cat's head and giving her ears a languid scratching.

"What doesn't add up?"

"I had- _or... _I'm _going _to have an encounter with Marie in a few hours, and... _fuck _okay I'm not beating around the bush so let's do this thing." The kid- _Dee- _turned and looked her in the eyes, fiercely determined greens staring her down. "I am, as we know, _time travel enabled- _it's a _thing. _And sometimes when I do big jumps, _duplication _occurs; where there's the version of me who hopped back and then the original version who existed in that period. Follow?"

Haley nodded slightly, though she had a feeling she knew where this was going. Marie had exhibited the ability to command and control that Dee apparently had as well, though she was yet to see them in action... after finding what it was like to be controlled, she didn't really _need _a demonstration... and she'd already had first hand experience with the whole _time travel duplication _thing. She'd _shot _one of Dee's duplicates to prevent a zombie apocalypse in this crazy little town, only to get emails from the surviving version mere hours later.

"Marie is _you? _Just... _way older?" _Kartwright quested as Princess shifted her head upwards, directing her scratching fingertips beneath the cat's chin. "Why the hell would she come back... what? Fifty odd years? _How old are you?" _

"I'm still figuring this part out- but I think that's the exact reason she killed _you." _Dee answered.

"What? _How would I know anything?"_

The kid paused. Haley sensed this was _the thing. _

"You're me, too. All three of us."

Kartwright blinked. Once, twice, three times. She stopped scratching. She then let out a short laugh.

"I'm sorry, _what? _How the fuck...?" She shook her head; maybe she just _misheard _the kid, but the claim remained in her head, exactly as spoken...

"I know! I know it sounds nuts, but just listen to me- that hat you're wearing; you've had it your whole life, haven't you?" Dee continued, rushing in before Haley could call the idea crazy and dismiss it... which she'd been on the edge of doing. Having her hat addressed gave her pause, however, because the kid was right. It was one of the few things she'd kept hold of, no matter what happened. She couldn't count how many times it had nearly gotten lost or taken away, but she'd protected the item fiercely- to the degree that she didn't really let anyone touch it. It was the one thing she had that was absolutely _hers._

"... yeah, I think. Amnesiac, remember."

"Right, right- _is there a star inside?" _

"How did you-" Haley faltered. _"H__ow did you know about that?!" _

"Because so does _mine!_ I was _way _into Super Mario as a kid and mom made that hat for me- she had just learned how to crochet and she made it _way _too big, but she put a star on the inside so I could wear it and feel safe!"

_So I could wear it and feel safe._

Haley didn't fire back. She felt like she was going into shock. Princess chewed on one of her idle fingers.

"... okay, _okay, _let's just... _say _I believe you. That you, me, and Marie are all the same person in different states... _what doesn't add up about the amnesia thing?" _

"You shouldn't be okay- like... _cognitive. _Marie said that when you delete memories but don't put anything back in for the brain to remember instead, _it causes delirium. _That's what happened to that agent that got sent after me, Agent Russel; I commanded him to forget everything he learned in South Park, and his brain _ate its own ass _until he went on a rampage through town and nearly killed one of my friends before he got shot down by the police. She couldn't have just made you _forget your entire life, _or you would have _lost your taint-tonguing marbles-" _

Dee tripped over what she was saying. Words skidded to a stop, like she'd found the solution mid sentence. She didn't say it aloud, but her face went into a wide state that silently expressed some version of _OH MY GOD._

"_She didn't make you forget- _she just told you _not to remember!" _

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

YOU ALL

HAVE NO IDEA

HOW LONG THIS FUCKING SCENE

HAS BEEN IN MY BRAIN

This _scene _has been the one I act out in front of mirrors/in the shower _for a shit-kicking year._

_HOLY FUCKING SHIT WE MADE IT._

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	10. Investigative Rummaging

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Investigative Rummaging::**

_Skeptical _was one way to describe the look on Kartwright's face. The doctor was still in a state of shock; someone she knew and trusted compelling her to _kill herself _still being a fresh memory that would need time to fade away into dreamlike fuzz. Dee wouldn't have blamed her if she tried to write this whole thing off as some kind of fever dream, particularly with everything else she was throwing on top of it... but what was she supposed to do? Just _sit on _everything they'd discovered so far? Like it or not, Kartwright was _involved, _and Dee still had more to give her.

She was also hoping, with the latest realization, Kartwright would have a decent amount to give back.

"Okay- _okay, _let's just... _let's just ride this wave of sci-fi time-duplicate memory-blocking fuckery-" _Kartwright muttered, her cat seeming to bore of chewing on her finger tips and departing the woman's lap to instead curl up directly next to her; rolling onto her back in an attempt to _cute _her way into more attention... apparently incapable of reading a room. Or _very _capable and trying to distract her owner. Dee wasn't sure. "So if she just... _told me not to recall, _instead of deleting things, that would mean I still have _everything _and just have to find a way around it? How does this shit even _work?" _

"I'm... still not sure. _Wendy _could talk you through all the theories she has, but it might take three hours and a slideshow." _Certainty _was not something Dee had when it came to the real life complications of her abilities. She still didn't know what it made it okay to talk to Wendy and Kenny- why speaking aloud to them didn't appear to have any ill effects, while she knew from childhood that it had triggered dangerous and creepy obsession in others... and she'd gotten a _lot _more cautious since Agent Russel. Before then, the occasional experiment seemed okay- _smart, _even, to test her bounds and figure out what she could.

Then she saw how wrong it could go, and she wasn't sure she'd ever get over the_ hell_ she'd gone through to make sure no one she cared about died that night, including another instance of duplicating herself with the accepted consequence that one version of her was going to have to take a bullet to the face. She still occasionally worried she'd done similar psychological damage to the president, and what she'd done to the woman would eventually come back to bite her in the ass... in-between everything _else _she was paranoid about these days.

"But I do have an idea." Dee continued after a pause. "If she forbade you from recalling, maybe I could... _overwrite _that with a fresh command."

"What, you'd just tell me to _remember _the past thirty years of my life?" Kartwright cocked an eyebrow, sounding doubtful as she gave in to her cat being adorable, scratching the needy feline beneath the chin.

"_Baboon orgies in a Mount Fuji hot-spring, **fuck** no-" _Dee quickly denied; that sounded... too absolute. Too much like what she'd done to Russel, where she'd given a broad command for him to _forget everything. _"More like... give permission? The first time I encountered Marie, before I made this jump back, I managed to fight back through the command to hold still enough to yell at her. It was a struggle at first, but she made this questioning noise, and I just... _decided _she was asking a question, and that was permission to speak. She also commented that we were both _resistant- _we probably have some natural immunity to our own brand, able to break through it when we focus."

Kartwright nodded slightly, lips tightening. "Agreed- she froze me on the spot before she made me pop myself in the head. I was able to push through it, so her shit isn't absolute... but focusing on a body part I can feel and I'm used to moving is _way different _than trying to remember things I don't even know are there."

"Right. That's why I think this will work- giving you a new command that basically _gives you the go-ahead _to remember things as you trip over them. Maybe it'll give you the room you need to chase things down on your own."

"You're suggesting that Marie has _controlled _everything I've remembered to this point." Kartwright stated flatly; it wasn't a question. Then again, she also didn't reason against it- Dee figured Kartwright had suspected as much at this point. If they were the same person, the likely had the same capacity for _paranoid speculation. _

_Is it still paranoid if you're right?_

"Okay, _to what end? _According to everything I was told, I suffered an _accident. _What if that's true? What if the amnesia is natural and Marie was just taking advantage of it?"

"What _kind _of accident?" Dee quested pointedly. She had a guess about the answer. Kartwright was yet to mention the nature of her amnesia, just that Marie had been there every step of the way after the fact... and it didn't sound like them not to at least _question _it, _unless..._

Kartwright made a face, like she'd been hit in the stomach. Wide surprised eyes stared out into space for a few seconds before she blinked, multiple times.

"I... _I don't know. _I never... they never told me, and I..."

"_Never thought about it." _Dee completed the sentence. "On the first run of this timeline, I encounter Marie at a garage me and the others flagged as a likely place where the machine from P0069 was being rebuilt, _as she's collecting it. _She makes me remember not her, _but you, _as the person collecting the machine. After the encounter I choose _not to engage, _even though I know exactly where you've been living and had friends willing to go with me. Marie came here and _killed you; _she framed you as our enemy, and then tried to make sure you couldn't debunk that... and set up a delay on my end to make it less likely me and my friends found anything besides what she _wanted _us to find."

"... more than that." The woman admitted. "She made me write a note to you kids- claiming I worked at the lab and was trying to cover it up, and that I couldn't live with the guilt of lying to you kids. It was meant to look like a suicide." She thought on that for a second. _"Delaying tactics- _a red herring. She told me I'd _outlived my usefulness, _and made it sound like she thought what was doing was going to _help 'us'- _she might have meant _us _as our collective existence in this timeline. _She has distinct goal." _

A beat of silence from both of them. This was the kind of heavy shit that Kenny and Wendy usually took off with, launching into a brainstorm... but Dee didn't have them right now. She just had this... older version of herself, who didn't have access to important memories that could answer _so many questions. _

"I think I can phrase the command so that, even if it doesn't work, it shouldn't do any harm." Dee posited. "And if you can remember, we might get a clue of _what the hell is going on." _

Dee watched as Kartwright stopped petting her cat, standing up with a contemplative look on her face. She began pacing the small amount of floor space in the cabin, up to the fold-out tables and then back to the aisle between the futon and the electric fireplace. She took a seat to get out of the woman's way, and offered a hand to the cat while she went up and down that little space multiple times, clearly buried in her own head as she mulled it over. Eventually she stopped, just short of the foot of the futon, wearing a look that Dee knew well- _she was spaced._

The cat sniffed curiously at Dee's fingers before rubbing its head eagerly against her hand.

"Alright." Kartwright agreed after several moments of standing still as a statue with a blank look on her face. _"Alright. _Let's do this- what do we need to do?"

_Relief. _Dee had still been afraid that her future self might _reject _all this hypothesizing and theorizing as _bullshit _and kick her out at gunpoint. "First thing's first, I'm gonna need a priming noise. I lost my phone recently, but I have the ones I've made saved to a Dropbox folder... Mind if I use your laptop?"

* * *

Mysterion remained hidden for nearly a full hour before leaving the truck, waiting and listening until he was entirely certain that he was safe to come out. In that time, growing increasingly stiff and sick of the stale air trapped beneath the blankets and tarp with him, he remained ever-focused on what information he could gather. He knew they were using portable generators out here, as the noise of one came to life somewhere in the space where the truck was parked, followed by the sound of a mechanical hoist that lifted the heavy load of the machine free from the truck- the material that was used to secure it in the bed tossed atop his hiding place as it was prepped to be unloaded. There was another sound after that; another motor that receded from earshot from directly behind the truck... maybe a cargo elevator?

After that, there was a distant boom, and then the sound of another vehicle entering the space. Someone else was down here, and they'd closed the topside door when they came down. There were muffled voices; the elder version of Alyssa speaking to the new arrival; they were too muffled for him to have any idea what they were saying, but the other person sounded masculine.

The generator was turned off, and then there was nothing. No voices, no footsteps, no sounds of equipment or otherwise... but Mysterion knew that he'd likely only get one shot at this. If he left his hiding place too soon, there was a chance of someone still being in the room to notice him. It wasn't until his all important _gut-feeling _told him he was safe to worm out from beneath the near unbearable heat captured in his hideaway, reaching up for the handle to open the door of the truck and slip out into much cooler, _much fresher _air.

He found himself in an almost hangar-like underground room. Roof, walls, and floor- all metal. There were lights secured to the high ceiling; long, narrow bulbs that suggested the facility _did _have its own power source... but it appeared unreliable. The lights had a regular flicker, providing only a dim sterile glow, and several of them simply not turning on at all; possibly due to neglect. There were more signs of this place being forgotten; rusty patches of the walls where ground water had eaten its way through and begun dripping through the walls, collecting on the floor and corroding rough patches, the edges of which had been colonized by some kind of sickly green _slime. _Spiderwebs turned one corner of the ceiling gray with how thickly it had been built upon, and the smell was like an open air junkyard in early spring; somehow _metallic _and _earthy _at the same time, and _incredibly wet. _

_This place is a fucking mess... why bring the machine back here? Unless it can't be set up anywhere else._

Further details came through after his initial assessment; he could see the long ramp they'd traveled down to get here from the surface; a tunnel that looked tall enough to accommodate semi-trailers- arriving in a room that was most certainly big and wide enough to turn one around in. It struck him as a loading dock; a way to bring in materials while the place was being built... and maybe secure _test subject _transfer, assuming this place practiced human experimentation as a regular matter of course.

Aside from the truck, there was another vehicle present. It was another truck, older, smaller, and more worn looking than the big white _bear _he'd hitched a ride in. It was matte dark blue, with two doors instead of four, and sandbags in the back bed to add weight and improve traction on snow and ice. There were patches where rust had begun to take hold, making the body of the vehicle look bubbled and rough. There were a number of bumper stickers on the back; most of them the _usual _redneck fare... he was pretty sure he'd actually seen this truck on the shitty side of South Park, although he couldn't recall anything specific about the driver.

Mysterion took note of the license plate, repeating it to himself a few times to make sure he had it in his head before moving in on the truck itself. The owner might have had something identifying inside the vehicle, and it paid to investigate while he had the opportunity. Trying the door, he found it wasn't even locked... actually, scratch that, it wasn't _latched- _the driver's door was broken, with a bungee cord looped around the interior handle; a rig he was familiar with as a stop gap for keeping a broken door closed until it could be fixed.

If ever. He was getting the sense that the driver of this truck was very much in a similar economic class to his family. The inside smelled familiar in the worst way; the smell of cigarettes, weed, cheap beer, and grease soaked into the worn upholstery of the seats. There were empty beer cans on the floor on the passenger side, as well as bags and wrappers from a hundred fast food meals.

In a quick search, Mysterion checked all the usual places one might tuck a proof of insurance card, hoping for something with a name... but wasn't surprised to come up empty. The storage cubby between the seats only contained a collection of cheap Bic lighters and more trash, and the glove box had paper for rolling joints and a dime bag, along with a smattering of prescription bottles... no two of which had the same name on them, but did share a commonality for the types of medication listed on their labels- prescription_ sleeping pills _and_ hardcore painkillers. _

_Someone likes their downers... could tranq a horse with all this stuff. _

Stepping back, he eased the driver's door back into the closed position, and turned his attention to the facility itself. As he suspected, there was a cargo elevator directly behind where the white truck had been backed up, in the center of the far wall from the ramp down. There was a hoist directly above, and a gas generator on the floor and wired into an electrical box that probably housed the breakers for both. Finally, all the way to the left of the parked truck against said far wall was a metal door.

Mysterion was faced with a choice. This was the point at which he could have bailed; started running back up the ramp to get outside and find out where the _hell _he was; follow the tire tracks back to the road until he got a landmark and a location for the others... _or _he could delve deeper in, and get more information about _who _and _what _they were dealing with.

The idea of sabotaging the facility and the machine was still on his mind. If he could take this place down himself, Alyssa would never have to come here and see the fate that nearly befell her family. He could end this, _tonight, _if he was smart enough.

He didn't even glance back at the ramp, sprinting for the door to head deeper in.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

_Kenny, that is possibly not the best plan_

_I get you wanna protect your girl_

_but_

_BOI_

It's amazing to receive such great feedback after the reveal of the series's major twist. I'm so glad it landed, and I am so thankful y'all followed me through this big-ass journey to get here XD

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	11. Shadows of the Absent

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Shadows of the Absent::**

There was a stairwell beyond the metal door from the loading dock, leading ever further down in a _dark _space that had no functioning lights left, and in which Mysterion could hear water actively dripping from _somewhere. _His hand on the railing and careful steps were made, finding his footing before continuing his journey into the complex.

The darkness was not complete. Below him, he could see light coming in from little squares- _doors _leading to different floors below him, he presumed. From his vantage point at the supposed top of the stairwell he could count three visible doors, but the space... _sounded _bigger, like it went deeper down.

His theory about the lights being doors was proven when one of them opened, a pair of figures passing into the stairwell and the light on that level giving him a better idea of things. The stairwell was a rectangular shaft of more metal, with steps coiling downwards against all four walls, with level landings at each door. The figures he saw in this moment of light were two floors below him; a large man and Alyssa's future version, shed of her long tan coat that she'd been wearing at the garage and glimpsed in a sleeveless, slacks, and hat.

_Still looks pretty strong for pushin' sixty. _

The man with her was taller than her, and... _big. _Hardly a surprise after all the fast food wrappers he'd observed in the man's truck.

"The portable generators aren't going to be enough- _we need the main generator back online." _She insisted to her associate as the heavy door shut behind them, plunging the place back into darkness. Mysterion listened- they were heading _down. _

"Bitch, I'm _workin' on it- _the whole lowest floor was _flooded last week, _and I gotta fix that thing _and _keep the water out. You wanna get on my ass? You can grab a fuckin' wrench and _help _before you start going off in my ear about the hard labor."

The man's voice was rough, with a rural middle American accent that Mysterion found... _familiar. _Sounded like a habitual smoker, too.

"_I just might.._. I can't test the repairs without power, and the final connections will need to be calibrated. Normally it took a team of _twenty _trained lab techs to get that monster up and running..." She mused as their voices and steps receded further down. Mysterion remained still; this metal tube would conduct sound like no one's business- he'd wait until they left the stairwell to continue on himself.

"What's the big plan on that?"

"You let me worry about that." She dismissed. "I've got a solution in the works, but I can't test it until..."

"_Until you've got main power- _yeah, yeah, I heard you the first time, Mary."

"_Marie." _The woman corrected him tersely.

_Marie. She's calling herself Marie? _That was a curiosity... then again, it wasn't like a time traveler could go around using their birth name and identity.

"Yeah, yeah, _whateva." _

Mysterion blinked. The familiarity of the man's accent was placed, and he actually felt his jaw come loose.

_It couldn't be._

She shook his head sharply, pulling back from the railing as he heard a door below creak open on old hinges and thud shut behind the pair, only then moving on himself to hurry down one level and open the first available door from his entry at the top. If the loading dock was level B1 on the dungeon map, this was B2.

He slipped past the door as quietly as he could, going from the dark stairwell back into a room with light.

The space he entered was _big. _Bigger than the loading dock he'd descended from. At least thirty feet from floor to ceiling, covering the three floors worth of light he'd seen in the stairwell. All three of those doors led to one room; _this _room. It appeared to be square, with equal walls as far as he could guess from where he stood, creating a space that he could imagine dropping the elementary school into while still having wiggle room on the sides.

The top layer, upon which he stood, appeared to be some kind of observation deck; constructed of metal catwalks that ringed the edges of the room as well as crisscrossed over it, with one crossing about every twenty feet and anchored to the ceiling for support by steel cables at each intersection created by the pattern. The main lighting for the room below, more long bulbs that provided weak and diffused gray fluorescent light, were rigged to the bottom of the catwalks, leaving the space above them incredibly _dark... _as if people atop them were meant to look down into the room below without being observed themselves; anyone who looked up would get the lights in their eyes, and their pupils could constrict too much to see anyone in the dim beyond.

The next level down looked like it was actually part of things. It, too, had a sort of catwalk that rimmed the room, but that platform was _wider _and _solid; _not suspended but actually built into the room itself, making a sort of inverted tiered effect, with cut-in stairwells leading down to the floor on the bottom level. The upper rim had a _number _of things Mysterion could not identify at a glance nor at distance; machines and panels built into the walls, coils of industrial cable, crates and barrels of unknown materials... the most he could understand was the bulky ass computer banks that looked like they were from the eighties.

Further below was the main floor, which looked sort of like Mission Control at NASA... only instead of banks of computers and desks being arranged in front of a screen displaying information from space-faring astronauts, it was instead arranged around an upraised central section in the middle of the room with... _something _atop it that looked like a silver chair built into a whole lotta other shit that looked like it would take out half of South Park's power grid if it was ever juiced up, with some kind of... sphere that sat in front of the chair atop a square post?

It didn't make much sense from up here.

There were grooves in the floor, and an open lane between the central plinth and the wall to Mysterion's right which the grooves followed. Following them with his eyes, he recognized the shape of a shaft sunk down into the room from above; the cargo elevator that came down from the loading dock.

He looked back to the strange chair built into the massive mechanism, and realized he was looking at the machine. _The _machine.

The part 'Marie' had transported had just been one small piece of it; the top bit, with the chair and the sphere.

_There is some serious mad science bullshit going on here... what the **fuck** does that thing **do? **_

Beyond that point, Mysterion had vastly underestimated just how _big _the complex was. He'd been expecting _souped up redneck panic bunker, _and instead gotten _Umbrella Crop's fucking live-in lab with a side of neglect and water damage and aesthetics of Doom on the 360... _which, granted, was the Doom that tripped in the dark and forgot it wasn't System Shock II, and that could have been a fair comparison if not for the _earthy wet smell _that permeated the whole complex.

Mysterion struck off to his left, following the rim of the room away from the cargo elevator, focusing on things closer to himself. After spending time getting ahold of the macro, he came to understand more micro details; that each level of this massive room had doors to other places, their spaces highlighted with yellow paint around their frames as well as single-word descriptions above them in giant block letters. Some doors were bigger than others, like a big double-door at the exact opposite end of the room from the cargo elevator on the ground level, the text above it reading _CONTAINMENT. _He could read a few more from where he was as well, such as _UTILITY C _and _BREAKER ROOM 4 _on the middle tier;locations he made note of as ways to cause trouble.

This place was already leaking. If there was an active water system, maybe he could _drown _it. Or at least put enough water on the main floor to fuck up the power system even more than it already was, if the conversation he overheard earlier was anything to go by.

On his own level, he was finding more _people-oriented _headings. _HEAD _was a military slang for bathrooms, _MESS HALL _and _LOCKERS _suggested that whoever used to work here might have been _living _here as well... and that thought got further solidified when he reached the far corner on his current path, made the turn to continue on against the far wall, and came to the door labeled _HABITATION. _It was a set of double doors; made not to latch but swing freely with padded edges that didn't crash against each other.

He was curious, but there wasn't any light in the hallway beyond the doors- _nonessential _since Marie and her _helper _weren't living here. If they were smart they probably killed the breakers for any section they weren't using.

He passed on that, simply making a note of the location on his mental map. A few more yards down this side of the catwalk, and he found something a touch more useful to him at the moment- _STAIRWELL B._

It was time to go further down.

This stairwell was exactly like the other one; same shape, same stairs, same darkness. His only consolation was that the only two other living persons he knew about in the building had _not _used this one to get wherever they were going... which made him feel assured enough to move a bit faster down these, going down a tier and returning to the massive room at the middle section.

Looking up from here was a little disturbing. He'd just been on the catwalks, but from below they didn't look like pathways. They just looked like rigging for the lights, and the ceiling was invisible beyond. It created the illusion of an endless _black abyss _beyond his head... and while he was sure Henrietta would find that _oh so Goth, _it made the space seem... _sinister _to him. Like the room opened into the gaping maw of some cosmic horror, held only at bay by a bank of poorly powered and completely un-maintained lights.

_Because that's what this fucking place needed, a side of Lovecraft._

He put his head down, focusing on where he'd arrived. He was across from the cargo elevator now, off-center with one of the stairwells down to the ground floor directly in front of him. Standing on the second tier, looking out over the banks of forgotten desks with forgotten equipment, he was on-level with the raised section in the center of the room... and he was willing to bet whatever experiments that were _done _with that machine, they were probably controlled by the computer banks and otherwise built into the walls on this level.

The machine was his objective. 'Marie' had mentioned that she didn't even know if she'd gotten the repairs right. If he could fuck with it _now, _they might not even know that he'd messed with the operation. Down the stairs, he descended into the final level of this cavernous room, and began to cross the floor in the aisle between work desks that was directly centered on both the machine and the cargo elevator shaft on the far end. Behind him was the set of double doors he'd spied from above, labeled _CONTAINMENT _in big black block letters that were _not helping _with the _Resident Evil _vibe he was still getting out of the place.

Quick estimation led him to guess that there were desks and work spaces down here for at least eighty people, but he had no idea what the equipment was for. Cabling was channeled along the floor in plastic sleeves, all radiating out from the central machine in the middle of the room. Was this shit all observation? Were the people in the pit, below the machine, the ones who monitored esoteric readouts of numbers they'd been trained to understand to keep things within limits? Were they the ones who recorded details of the experiments?

Things had been done here. Awful things. He could _feel _it.

Mysterion pushed himself up to a jog, feeling the hair on the back of his neck rise.

Unlike the dark gray of the rest of the facility's construction, the machine still had a bright shine to it; even the base atop which it was built. While the entire complex around it was gunmetal gray with rust spots where water had found its way through, this specific part of it shined bright and clear, to the point that Mysterion could see his distorted reflection in the metal. It was build in rings, rising up in the middle of the room in circular sections, each tier of its base connecting to numerous cables that ran back through the rest of the room to the workstations he had observed. There were four major connections at the absolute base, as thick as his entire fucking body and bolted into place at equidistant positions that reminded him of a compass, covered by a black mesh. These cables ran not into the room, but directly into the floor- _power cables _if he were to wager a guess.

The rings of the platform created steps, with a textured pathway directly in front of him that led up to the top. He climbed it, arriving within moments at the silver chair, the post, and the ball.

The chair reminded him of pictures of _electric chairs- _there were restraints built into the seat, and it did not look comfortable. There was no padding, only hard edges and a system of black straps that appeared to be made of the same woven material as the casings for the power cables. They were arranged in a way that looked like they'd buckle a person to the seat itself around the chest, across the waist, and with separate straps to secure either leg down to the outside edge of the seat, with a central anchor on the surface of the seat that came up near the groin.

The chair had no arms. If he were sitting in it, he could estimate that the sphere atop its post would be level with his chest- making it just a little lower in relation to an adult.

The sphere, too, had restraining straps. They were anchored to the post upon which the sphere sat; a ball somewhat larger than a soccer ball, shiny, smooth, and with a central seam where the halves had been unified.

This close, he could observe an imperfection on the sphere's surface. Shadows of shapes, staining the bright, reflective material darker and darker with each layer. Coming around to the chair while still looking at it, he came to realize this blemish was on both sides; a symmetry of shadowing against the lower half of the strange ball, closer to the chair's side.

Layers upon layers of oh-so-faint impressions, it took him a moment to realize what they were.

_Hand prints. _

A picture formed in his head. Someone strapped into this chair, their hands secured to the sphere; helpless and afraid.

And whatever had been done to them, it left a shadow of their palms against the metal.

He heard a door open, and dove off the side of the machine to hide.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

_INVESTIGATION!_

Did my best to paint y'all a word picture on this one, practice dat descriptive language and all that.

_I wonder who Marie's associate could be _

**:3**

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	12. My Future Self 'n' Me

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – My Future Self 'n' Me::**

Dee would be lying if she said she wasn't anxious about this.

She'd downloaded one of her priming noises from online storage, and queued it to play from the speakers of Kartwright's little silver laptop. The woman herself was standing ready, and the pair were probably wearing mirrored expressions. Neither of them were entirely _certain _about this, but both had agreed on it as a way forward.

It was strange, _surreal, _to see that expression on an adult face when Dee knew it mostly from how it _felt to wear it herself. _The longer she was in Kartwright's presence, the more she felt utterly inept for having not seen their similarities sooner- in her defense, she and the doctor had only seen each other _twice _before today, and one of those experiences was something she had to adsorb via dreams after the time twin who was actually there _died. _They weren't exactly meetings that lent themselves to thorough and thoughtful examination, less so when Dee had thought of the doctor as a strategic asset over any sort of legit allyship. Before today, she hadn't exactly thought of her as a _person, _but rather a means to an end... and, later, a possible adversary, to whom person-hood was denied as a matter of course, in case drastic action needed to be taken.

Now... well, she couldn't help looking at her. Noting where she could see her own rounded nose and strong jaw, and how they wore their hair with their hats in a similar fashion; namely tucking the body of the hair in the hat while leaving the bangs somewhat free. Eyes were the same, her face simply fuller by the nature of being an adult who had reached the age of thirty-odd and wasn't keeping up with an athletic teen's metabolism anymore. Body wise was the same; the pear-shaped bone structure of narrow shoulders and broad hips, mildly short-backed with longer legs filling out an ultimately _below average _height.

Getting a peek at how she was going to grow up might have been more exciting if the situation wasn't so tense. Questions of how the two of them had ended up here, existing at the same time, with one deprived of their memory was... troubling.

"Ready?" She quested, looking up to her.

"As I'll ever be." Kartwright returned with a shrug. "Let's do this."

_Let's get this over with _is what the tone of voice said. Dee gave her a short nod.

A tap on the space-bar of the laptop made the priming noise play. It wasn't refined like Marie's was; more garbled and rough, and not stabbing quite as viciously into the ears... although it certainly wasn't pleasant by any measure. Dee let it run out the full seven seconds of the audio file's length, looking up at Kartwright as the woman's eyes screwed shut and her fists clenched... but she made no move to cover her ears.

This was necessary. This was how she targeted effects, and enhanced them, although she did not yet understand exactly _how... _simply that it worked. Wendy had some theories, sure, but that didn't mean Dee _understood it._

_If this works, maybe I'll get a better idea of how **this shit **works, too. That would be nice._

The sound ended, and Dee faced up to Kartwright, adapting a little bit of the cadence she'd heard from Marie; that carefully enunciated way of speaking, without emotional inflection.

"_You **can** recall your memories." _

It was a simple statement. Short- and like Dee had explained before; one that _gave permission _rather than _demanded. _It felt a little stupid, like she were a stupid kid trying to wave a magic wand to undo the block Kartwright had been dealing with, but she made sure to deliver it with _certainty. _The woman looked down at her, appearing to hold similar doubts and looking like she didn't quite buy it, remaining quiet for a moment after before...

"That's it?"

Embarrassed flush made the back of her neck warm, but she tried not to show it, holding her ground. "I told you- I had to phrase it so it wouldn't cause harm; if I _tell _you to do something you'd try to do it, even if there's nothing there. The intent is to _enable; _like... _changing your mental permissions, _I guess."

_Suck a seal's taint, I wish Wendy was here. She could make all of this sound better._

"So what now?" Kartwright asked dryly. "I just... try to remember something I've never remembered before? Where the hell am I supposed to start?"

"Maybe try to remember the accident?"

_Influence _was still active. She watched as Kartwright blinked, looking as if she'd been mentally _shoved _in a specific direction, but recovered a second later. The fact that Dee had made a question was the only thing that saved that statement, and she promptly clenched her jaw shut- returning to her mute state and pressing her lips tightly together.

_Fuck, fuck, fuck, fuck, I'm sorry!_

"Wait- wait a minute..."

Kartwright blinked, her head dipping down a second, growing thoughtful in the face where disgruntled surprise had been there seconds before.

"... there was something there, I just..."

The woman's eyes pressed closed, her right hand reaching out for the fold-out table the laptop sat atop of, gripping the edge cheap plastic surface like she was about to lose her balance. She wavered on the spot, and Dee prepared herself to catch her if she suddenly _fell._

Green eyes snapped open, and Kartwright's jaw hung loose.

"_It wasn't an accident." _

* * *

Touching a single event tugged upon a multitude of faces and names, rattling like drops of dew from a disturbed spiderweb of association.

When Dee told her to try remembering the accident, there was a snapshot that jolted loose. It was an image that made no sense for the instant she had it, and she _yanked away _from the compulsion on reflex as both body and brain remembered the _last time _she was compelled to do something and snapped into instant rebellion.

It was only after the reflexive response that she realized something important had just happened. The image made no sense, but it was still there- it didn't fade away or grow fuzzy, or disappear entirely save for a few vague feelings about it. She could grasp it again, and doing so did not lead her to a dead end of frustration and confusion.

No, she held onto that one picture, that one frame of a lost reel, and other frames of the sequence fell into place.

Her hands, strapped to a... _silver ball, _using straps made out of black mesh. That was the image. She could see her reflection, distorted on the surface of the sphere but looking back at herself with terror all the same. A slide knot around her wrists ensured pulling away from the sphere only made her binding to it tighter, and she had felt her pulse in her fingers as blood flow to them were constricted. Her body was anchored to a hard seat, around the chest, waist, and legs, and there was a hum of _power _beneath her that vibrated beneath the entire structure.

She remembered feeling betrayed. Angry. _She'd been sold out._

The scene spun backwards, to a traffic stop on the highway. A trio of unmarked black cars, and men in suits stepping out. Cuffs secured over her wrists, and a gag placed in her mouth. She'd been panicked, terrified and betrayed- _how did they know where I was, how did they know where I was going?_

_**He sold me out.**_

Further back, a night at home. A single bedroom apartment and loud music, and a desperate knock on the door in the middle of the night. A man in her doorway; an old face from growing up in a shitty little town with shitty friends, but she still let him in and offered him a drink. He was scared. He'd been having nightmares, but he thought they were memories; echos from another version of his life.

A version of his life where he _ruined everything, _all with a single mistake.

He begged her to go back, and take him with her. She had the authority, the position, the access. She could help him _do _something. To go back and fix a terrible mistake.

She'd been having dreams, too. It was the only reason she agreed.

All at once, she arrived back at the present moment with wide eyes and a lax jaw, confused, horrified, and _trembling. _She was shaking as she realized, all at once, she'd been operating within a false identity, and under false pretenses.

"_It wasn't an accident." _She breathed, swallowing hard.

Staring up at her was... _oh god she remembered that face now- _a face she used to wake up to in the mirror, a face she should have recognized in an _instant _upon first meeting this mildly androgynous kid, because she used to _be _this kid...

_Holy shit, I remember my name. _

"_... Alyssa, _right?"

She watched as the kid- _her younger self, _blinked before breaking into a euphoric smile. It was the kind of glee that came from a long-shot experiment working out; the sort of fist pumping _HOLY SHIT YES _that arrived when victory arrived despite seeming entirely implausible.

Not just younger. _Alternate. _They were from different histories, different versions of reality- with her own intervention creating the split. She didn't _remember _this moment from the other end; she didn't recall seeing this cabin in her younger days, and she didn't remember holding onto the _Buttlord _thing past the age of twelve. That meant this wasn't a loop, or a predestination situation, but rather the genesis of a new timeline where she, her younger self, and her older self all existed at the same time-

_Fuck me, **Marie**\- did she cause my timeline? **Did she start this mess? **_

"_Crocodile skin dildo _I'm gonna need a fucking _flowchart to get this shit straight in my head... __**I hate time travel." **_

Despite Alyssa being a name that belonged to both of them, she found herself thinking of the kid as Alyssa as she scoffed and let out a wry chuckle. She'd been living under the assumed identity of _Haley _for a few years, and it made her thoughts less confusing to keep their instances separate within her own head... similar to allowing Marie to remain _Marie, _despite the fact that her name was probably _also _Alyssa.

"Sounds like... _us?" _Alyssa offered with a shrug, offering a hand that Haley took. She must have been shaking bad enough that it was visible... or maybe they just knew each other's tells. "C'mon, let's sit down... you can take a second to process it."

"Think it's gonna take more than a fuckin' _second, _kid." Haley muttered, but didn't fight getting guided back to her futon to once again sit her ass down. Unlike before, where she'd been agitated and unable to think without pacing, she was now _exhausted _as an internal process kicked off a domino effect that extended well beyond conscious recollection. She felt like she was burning energy at an incredible and utterly _unsustainable _rate, all as her brain attempted to gather up the precious shards of context needed to make sense of the original event she'd tried to remember. It wasn't just her experience of that moment, but the understanding of it, built upon understanding of previous moments in the grand change of memory and deduction that was the human mind's way of _perceiving itself and its experiences- _everything built atop what came before.

Returning to the original moment; strapped in, staring at the stretched out reflection of herself, the reel was allowed to progress forward. To the hum of power getting louder, and white electrical arcs rising up at the edges of her vision with the occasional blinding band diving in to strike the top of the sphere.

She remembered screaming, and a horrible burning sensation on the back of her right hand; a place where she currently had a vivid scar.

She remembered barely remaining conscious after it was over, her limp body pulled from the machine by many hands.

_She remembered Marie being there. She remembered the tests for weeks after, to make sure it worked. To make sure her voice was useless, and her ability to rip through time was broken._

"_Fuck." _She swore softly. _"The bitch de-powered me. _The machine- I was there, and..." Her head shook. Her brain kept circling back to the moment of blinding agony, the stray arc of lightning that had burned through her right hand during the experiment, and the delirium thereafter. She'd been so confused right after; it was when she'd originally lost her memory. Her amnesia, the _original _bout of it, had started _then- _caused by the trauma of the experiment.

It wasn't until later, when she started picking things back up, that Marie told her not to remember, and assigned her a new identity.

Alyssa put a hand on her back, another on her arm; a silent encouragement to _take it slow, _though she was certain the kid was _dying _to know at this point. Did this count as self care?

"Why did you come back in the first place?" Alyssa asked. "Why are you here?"

Guiding questions, ones that drew her out of the broader experience and threw her back to that apartment. Back to busting her ass for her doctorate, after she'd moved away from South Park and decided the study of _infectious disease _was what she wanted to do for the rest of her life- so much so that she'd accepted the burden of student loans to do so. Back to living alone after a violent episode in her love-life, and the factor that had dictated living in that specific city and going to that specific school- and someone else who was starting his career.

"Kyle." She remembered aloud. "_Son of a bitch, Kyle- _he... someone had started a _private _time travel company, outside of the government, and Kyle had become an activist lawyer. He was sure something was fucky, and wanted _me _to join up with the operation to be his eyes on the inside- get enough dirt to force regulation and protect people. I didn't want to, I was _done _with the whole time travel thing for the most part, but... _ugh _I was still sweet on the asshole, even after we broke up, and-"

"_Whoa, whoa- **you dated Kyle?" **_

Haley blinked at being interrupted, head jolting back slightly.

"I mean... _yes? _Since when do we _care? _Aren't you still in the '_crushes are hormonal bullshit and love is a lie' _phase?"

Far as she could remember _her _life, she didn't start dating until high school... and _that _had been a mess, too.

"I mean, _eh... sorta? _Me and Kenny..."

Haley choked. _That _wasn't what she expected, although... yeah, this version of herself was still working closely with Mysterion, where as _her _memory reflected Kenny as distant and aloof. She never really got to know him very well, and he was filed as 'the loner' by the time she finally started considering companionship. The last time she personally spoke a word to Kenny, at least in her original timeline, was probably around the time she obtained her driver's license.

"_Anyway!" _Alyssa barked to move on. "Private time travel company, Kyle doesn't like it, asked you to join up- what happened?"

"Well... he was right." Haley sighed, slouching forward with her elbows settled on her legs. "Some opportunistic asshole basically trying to train a private squad of _time cops _to change the past and future for the highest bidder. They'd already been head-hunting for me; not everyone can handle the _mental _effects of time travel; the memory echos, the shock-waves from collapsed timelines, understanding the _nature _of time and the nuances of how it behaves... The government had me on a _list _of people who could handle that crap, and I guess the company bought that, because they were calling _me. _Getting in for Kyle was just a matter of _saying yes, _and the rest of evidence collection. I was never a fan of government regulation, but... _yeah, _this is one case where _someone _needed to be controlling this shit, and it wasn't goddamn business interests, that was for sure."

"So how'd you end up coming back? I'm guessing their tech wasn't _fart powered, _unless someone figured out a new formula for our medicine."

"Medicine...?" Haley blinked, and then actually let out a laugh. "Oh my _fuck, _those little white pills- I forgot about that shit!"

"... to be fair, you forgot about _everything." _

Haley shot Alyssa a look, but let it go with only an eye-roll. "Yeah, okay, but those pills are just lactose- _concentrated milk sugars. _We're lactose intolerant; you could get the same effect from chugging half a carton of heavy cream. Dad got those pills from some asshole selling placebos to panicked parents with powered kids on the internet- our super-powered asshole was just a _coincidence." _

Alyssa's look of surprise was without words; dumbfounded as her lips turned inwards and her eyebrows flew upwards.

"... moving on." Haley decided, before she got sidetracked and returning to the chain of events that had landed her here, telling _herself _about bullshit she'd learned a lot later in her own timeline. Was that against the rules? _Fuck it, someone else had already broken them way worse than her. _"Gathering enough evidence required sticking with the company for a while, and..." She trailed off. She'd picked up a flash of this earlier, in the original rushed chain of recollection. Returning to it, she quickly lost her humor, hands clenching as she found the thread that led her here.

"... _goddamnit, that son of a bitch... I shouldn't have listened to him." _

"Which son of a bitch? We know a few of them."

"_Eric! _Fucking _Cartman!" _

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

So in case y'all didn't get it, the title of this story was a reference to the title of a specific South Park episode.

Which I have now used as the title of this chapter.

_Almost like I'm building off some canon material or some shit up in here._

Also revealing that Alyssa's medicine, this whole time, has just been milk powder- a common 'inert' ingredient cut into medicines, drugs, and used for placebo pills. I THOUGHT IT WAS FUNNY.

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	13. Just How Much DOWN Does This Place Have?

**::My Future Me, Myself, And I – Just How Much DOWN Does This Place Have?::**

"Fat, stupid, strung out fucking son of a bitch... where whore-humping hell did your life go so _wrong, _Eric?"

Mysterion listened as Marie muttered to herself, _clack-clack-clacking _her way across the cavernous room in her heeled boots. What she said was more than enough to confirm his earlier theory, much as it shocked him. He might have considered it all just one massive coincidence... but to learn the man was also named _Eric?_

The stature of her associate, his accent, his affinity for shitty, shitty food- _It was Cartman. A __**future **__version of Eric fucking Cartman._

He could only assume it was the same man to whom she'd been speaking on the phone in the truck, but she'd promised to that man a return to his _perfect home and family, _or something along those lines... like a specific future had been lost, and whatever they were lining up to do here was going to give that future back to him.

_Eric, living the American dream? Rich, with the house and the wife and the 2.5 kids and probably a dog? That's... **Jesus **I really hope the spouse in that scenario isn't Heidi. _

There were other curiosities at the moment, however; specifically the fact that Marie was musing _aloud _to herself- it wasn't a habit Alyssa, _his Alyssa, _was prone to. More often, Alyssa would lapse into _silence _if she was thinking particularly hard about something; possibly the result of being conditioned most of her life to not speak for fear of doing harm or attracting attention her family did not want. Hearing this older version of her speak aloud in a moment in which she believed she was alone pointed to a... _difference _between them- more than just the difference in years. Particularly if she and Cartman were working _together, for his benefit. _Everything he knew about those two suggested they'd _kill each other _long before they ended up in a willing partnership with no leverage or additional motivation.

Something about this situation wasn't quite adding up, yet.

"Tch... what am I saying? I know _exactly _where it went wrong; when you broke the biggest rule in the book- _on purpose. _Self-sabotaging..."

Her tone was still aggravated, but there was also a note of sympathy. Of _care- _the exhausted kind, where someone had been invested in a losing proposition for _far _too long, and given away mountains more than they were ever going to get back.

_What was she talking about? Eric broke a rule? _Hardly surprising, Cartman broke rules all the time- often out of spite, _usually _for personal gain. The guy was always out for himself... but that tone- _did she feel bad for him? _

He couldn't imagine Alyssa ever having sympathy for Eric. Alyssa was the one who betrayed Eric and punched him right in the nose the _second _she got the chance when they were kids playing Stick of Truth, and gleefully beat the _hell _out of him during the whole _Mitch Conner _incident... then again, she'd gleefully beat the hell out of _pretty much everyone _back then; Eric was just the only one that came out on the other side with bruised ribs and a concussion. He was fairly certain any capacity she had to provide Eric with a single _drop _of care or sympathy dried up back when he'd defended _Lehman the Pedo teacher _a month or so ago...

These were thoughts for another time. Those footsteps were approaching where he'd tucked himself against the base of the machine, having made a leap to the floor that caused his knees and ankles to ache with the impact, even when he rolled to offset the momentum and quiet his landing. He realized, with some dread, that she was likely coming to check on the machine after it had been moved... and if she climbed atop the structure, he would be visible if and when she happened to look down.

He needed to be elsewhere, but the metal floors of the room would certainly give him away if he made a run for it. Maybe one of the nearby workstations? They were cheap wooden desks, which could be easily hidden beneath... but could he _get _to one without being seen or heard?

Cautiously, he began to travel around the central platform, distancing himself where Marie would arrive while looking up and out as his options. Nimble as he was, making the leap to the nearest workstation was a good ten foot gap; a gap with no cover... and _metal fucking floors. _

Careful steps, steps that _rolled _the surface of his shoes from heel to toe, toe to heel, moving as close to silent as he could, required him to look down as he came up on one of the four gigantic cables connected to the machine.

It was at this moment that he realized those massive cables were fed through the floor by way of tubes, as wide as a manhole, that the cable did not entirely fill. He hadn't noticed before, focused on investigating the machine, but the difference between the _cable _and the _hole _it was fed into left a gap; not a _huge _gap, the average adult would be hard pressed to pass through it... but he was, as Alyssa like to phrase it, _a skinny son of a bitch, _and the big-ass cable would provide more than adequate handhold to lower himself down quickly and quietly.

His gut said yes, and he questioned it no further. With Marie still on the approach, he dropped down and forced his body into the gap. It was tight, with his back pressed tight against the wall of the metal tube and his chest against the mega-sized wire, but he fit! And the woven nature of the cable's covering gave him something for his fingers to worm into, grasping and pulling himself deeper into the tunnel, disappearing down into the vertical space in a matter of seconds.

_Pretty fucking claustrophobic, though._

There was no additional space, no way he could look down below himself and get an idea of how far this tunnel went, or if it remained this size all the way down... but he kept going, carefully sliding his hands down to find a new grip on the woven texture of the cable's casing, digging his fingertips in, and forcing his body further down by a few more inches while doing his best not to _bump _any part of himself against the outside shaft. At the same time, his feet were doing an important job- carefully feeling ahead for any changes to the tube or the cable. The tube had to be at _least _as long as he was tall, since his whole body had fit into it. Longer than that, as he'd been able to descend a few feet after that and still encountered no change... although every inch felt longer when he was dragging himself along against the force of friction.

It was the force that would leave him _stranded _here until he died of thirst if he got stuck, too wedged in for gravity to drag him out.

_Slow deaths are the worst. **The absolute worst. **_

A few pulls later... and his heel lost the wall of the tube.

He exhaled a sigh of relief he didn't know he'd been holding.

The more he levered himself down, the more gravity gained ground against friction. A subjective eternity... and probably only one _real _minutelater, he arrived in a new space where his feet were able to make contact with something like a floor, _below _the main room.

Escaping the tube entirely, he learned two things very quickly. The space he stood in was _barely _taller than he was, the top of his hood brushing the ceiling, and there were lights down here. Not built into the structure. He could see there was a line of lights actually built into the ceiling, but those were dark. Instead, a chain of extension cords ran through this space; a tunnel beneath the room above, bringing power to a series of work lights hooked onto one of the many pipes that also ran along the ceiling.

He'd gotten into a utility access tunnel; the cable he'd been clinging to actually continued downwards through another pipe like the one he'd just squeezed into, but it also bisected this other tunnel carrying power and water to other parts of the complex.

Mysterion checked his mental map. This tunnel stretched in a straight line to either side, and based on his orientation when he'd lowered himself in, one end of this tunnel extended towards the cargo elevator and the loading dock; his original entry point... which meant the other way led to whatever was beneath the big double doors that had been labeled _CONTAINMENT _on the lab floor.

He had a moment of indecision. His original idea of getting to the machine and sabotaging it was no good, now. Marie would have looked at it by now and taken stock of its condition. The window to break anything on it and pass it off as travel damage had passed... but he hadn't seen anything that could be easily break, anyway, aside from the big ball in the middle... too obvious. But there were other things could could exploit, now that he was here; the complex was having power trouble. Anything he could do to delay the lab from becoming fully operational would be to his advantage, and the advantage of his friends.

Whatever was going on here, it was beginning to feel... _bigger than him- _and not just in physical real-estate, in the way that the lab was far larger than he imagined, but also the scale of the place. The machine, all those workstations, the sense that something... _horrifying _and _inhumane _had been done here.

For a moment, standing up on the platform, he felt as if he had seen a flash of a ghost, palms still adhered to the sphere in the middle of that machine, screaming for mercy. Maybe he had- wouldn't be the first spook he'd made contact with this week.

_Or maybe it would? It's technically Saturday... **fuck, **time travel is weird. Whatever; onwards and deeper. _

The presence of _light _made him tread carefully; it suggested this was one of the sections Marie's associate was working in to try and bring power back to the machine... an associate who was apparently, he reminded himself, _Eric fucking Cartman. _That still boggled him. What had brought them into the past? What was Marie trying to _do? _

Mysterion and Buttlord had learned a _long_ time ago that changing the past to try and improve the future could get messy in a hurry unless you were undoing just _one _cause to _one _effect. Like the whole _zombie apocalypse _thing at the beginning of the year; that had been something that could be stopped with a singular action. The future they got instead wasn't _perfect _by any measure, considering everything that happened after Alyssa tried to make a deal with the government... but it was preferable to the alternative. That one worked because it was simple, direct; only one thing needed to be changed to make the whole timeline collapse like a proverbial house of cards.

Things got slippery when playing the long game. Jumping backwards to fix the subjective present involved more dominoes the further one went back, and it was hard to predict exactly how they'd fall. By her age, Marie had come back _decades- _and while there was a chance that she'd somehow found a way to take measured action to do one very specific thing... he really didn't trust anything that involved that _machine _up there.

Remembering the shadows, the layered image of _hand-prints _on the sphere, made a shiver pass up his spine. The shape hadn't been that of a singular set of hands. There had been _layers _to the dark blemishes on the sphere, each the shape of someone's palms and fingers, and each burnt in as some kind of afterimage of the human that had been attached- snapshots of agony, he felt. He'd found no evidence that what the machine did was painful, but there was no way it _wasn't. _He was certain of it.

Whatever happened, he wasn't going to let Alyssa get strapped into that thing. No way in hell- _seriously, he'd go to hell and get Satan in on this shit if it came to that. _He could owe that big red fucker a favor if it meant making certain she never had to sit in that chair.

Unaware of just how much further the utility tunnel _went, _Mysterion found himself approaching a ladder. It was, like everything else here, _made of metal, _and extended into another manhole-sized tube both above and below... and this one didn't have a giant cable it in for him to squeeze by. The wire that powered the work lights went _down_, woven through the rungs of the ladder. Faintly, he could also hear a motor; probably another gas generator. Looking _up, _there was no light- an inactive section, outside Eric's work area; a good place to retreat.

Behind him, he heard steps in the tunnel. They echoed from far away, heavy things that cared not at all about the noise- the far end of the access tube that Mysterion guessed to be beneath the cargo elevator shaft. Turning to glance that way, he couldn't immediately see anyone in the spots of yellow provided by the work lights, but the tunnel _did _drop off into inky black. There could have been turn-offs at the far end, bringing power and water to junction areas like the utility rooms he'd seen above. Either way, it was time for a decision; up or down.

_Gut check._

_Going down._

He slipped into the vertical tube, grasping the outside of the metal ladder and sliding down, the material of his gloves protecting him from friction and letting him descend in near silence. The further down he went, the louder the sound of the motor became. In time, he caught a scent as well; _fuel._

A few seconds later, his theory about the gas-power generator was confirmed as he hit the bottom of the ladder, near which was the rumbling device in question. The noise was the kind that vibrated through his bones at close range, and deafened his ears. There was a temptation to kill it- Eric was above him, presumably coming down. Plunging him into darkness would be a fast way to spook the guy, and fumbling with a generator in pitch black would be a frustrating little delay in whatever they were doing... but that would also leave _him _in the dark.

For now, it was just another mark on his mental map. Maybe it would come in handy later.

Instead, he turned his attention to examining the room in which he had a arrived. His ears had popped again on the transition down, making him flex his jaw to work out some of the weirdness after swallowing to normalize the pressure. How deep down did this place _go? _A question for another time; he'd found himself in yet another metal box... this one like some kind of supply room. Metal shelves lined the walls and created corridors of stuff. He could spy bottles and barrels that smelled of machine oil, coolant, and fuel; probably where they were getting gas for the generators, if not the genis themselves. The one he was standing next to certainly _looked _old enough to have been forgotten with the rest of this place. There was a tool cabinet affixed to the far wall, near an open door that led out into a section where the facility lights appeared to have power, flickering and dim though they were.

Mysterion approached said tool cabinet. It was a floor-to-ceiling thing, with doors that opened outwards and displayed a number of hand tools for a variety of jobs, ranging from _tiny _screwdrivers no longer than his pinkie finger, to a gigantic wrench that he was pretty sure weighed as much as he did... and he suspected was purpose made for the big-ass cables on the machine that was somewhere above. Below this_ show window _of tools was a chest of drawers that probably contained more bits and bobs, but Mysterion's attention was stolen by something left on the work surface created atop it.

A flashlight- a simple little LED flashlight, the kind powered by AAA batteries, that could fit into his hand... and be easily misplaced.

He took it, looking up and examining what else he could 'borrow' without immediate notice. The big tools were out; much as the giant wrench would be helpful in breaking stuff, it was certain to be missed if he took it. A classic screwdriver though? He might be able to open up more routes, and into his back pocket it went. There was a hammer, too, that he could slip through his belt and take with him.

The noise from the generator was too loud to hear anyone coming. After every acquisition, he glanced back to make sure Eric wasn't descending into the room and about to discover him. Looking back into the tool cabinet once more, he found the last thing worth stealing wasn't up on the rack but was, again, down on the work surface- a forgotten and oil stained hand towel. It, too, was secured by looping it between his body and his belt, turning away and instead putting his attention to the bottles and jugs of _liquids _in the room. He had to assume this stuff was in its original containers, and he was looking for anything _small _with a flammable warning on it.

This whole place was made of metal, so _torching _it would be a rough proposition, but if he could find a key place to set a fire? That could be a game changer.

A white bottle was selected, probably a one-liter container that was mostly full and securely sealed with a cap. He had no idea what it was, but it was marked with the _fire bad _symbol, and that was all that really mattered to him.

After that, he hurried out of the open door of the room. The smell of the exhaust was killing him, and he was sure the carbon monoxide wasn't helping either. That room was _not _properly ventilated for the operation of a generator, and just staying in there for an extended amount of time had made him feel a little light-headed. _Safety _was obviously not Eric's highest priority.

But what was? What was in this for _him? _What had he lost, and how had he lost it... and why was Marie willing to fuck with time to help him get it back?

_And what did that all have to do with Alyssa? _

Exiting the supply room, Mysterion found himself in a hallway that split off in three directions; left, right, or straight ahead. Directionally he knew _right _would take him back towards the main room of the lab, and _left _would take him away from it, with _straight ahead _running parallel... but he had no idea how far he had descended. He was obviously at a level _lower _than the main room, now. Quick glances up and down the metal halls gave him minimal direction, but there was a yellow line on the floor that ran from the right hallway and through the junction where he currently stood, turning into the hall that went straight ahead. Or maybe the line came from the hall in front of him and veered right- either way it looked like a guide of some kind.

_Onwards and deeper, _he thought to himself... _again._

With a turn, he bolted down the hallway to his right, running to get some distance while he could get away with the noise.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner:: **

I always have so much trouble with act two and the transition into act three- there's always this weird point between _rising action _and _culmination _where I struggle to find just the right point to go from one to the other. It always feels like I could include just a _little more _information, or wind things up just a tiny touch more.

Then again, I think that's the trap I fell into on the last story. XD

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	14. Trips and Triggers

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Trips and Triggers::**

"Cartman?"

_What the hell did that paint-huffing moron do **now? **Or... I guess... in the future? **Ugh, fuck my life.**_

"He set me up!" Kartwright... or, Dee supposed, _Alyssa, _shouted while launching herself up off the futon, fists clenched and her brows furrowed over furious green eyes. Seeing her angry led her to seeing more of their resemblance- the way the woman looked ready to actually fire off and hit someone, with her feet set side and solid against the floor and her clenched knuckles raised up to chest level while her elbows tucked in. That was a pose that was ready to _fuck shit up._

Despite them obviously being the same person, Dee couldn't help but think of her as Kartwright. It was easier to keep shit straight when they all had different names.

"I came back because he _begged _me to- came to my place in the middle of the night! I don't even know how he got the address- maybe he tricked Kyle into giving it to him, but... _ugh, he cried and everything, I can't believe I fell for that..." _

Kartwright did fire out a shot- she turned and crashed the knuckles of her right hand, the scarred one, against the wooden frame of the cabin's door. The impact made the door itself rattle. _"FUCKER!" _She shouted in time, withdrawing and landing another hit that _had _to jar her knuckles, but the woman seemed not to care. After that, her curled fingers remained hard against the wall, the tension in her upraised arm visible as she faintly huffed; getting her breath back after shouting.

"... what _happened?" _Dee quested, feeling a little of that fire bubbling up in her own gut. _What did Cartman __**do **__to us? _Was really the question, the follow-up being _And can I __**punish **__his current, younger self for it?_

"He came to my place like he was all fucked up over these dreams- _really _laid it on thick, said he was having nightmares every night and he couldn't get any sleep- he looked like shit, _but he'd looked like shit since he dropped outta high school! _Went _on _and _on _about this other life he felt like he'd lived, and how it all went wrong when he- _the CEO of a time travel company __**he **__founded, _went back and talked to his younger self, telling him about their future success. He _swore _it was real, that he remembered it from bein' a kid, he _remembered _the man who had come and talk to him, all _healthy _and _fit _and _buff, _talking about turning his life around-"

That was... _an image. _Alyssa had never heard about this event. Maybe it never happened in her version of reality? … or maybe it was from before she moved to town. It always seemed like she hadn't quite heard it all, even after the guys had told her about so much of the stuff they'd done. Either way, that sounded like a _fucking stupid _thing to do; interfering with a younger version like that, when a good future already existed? _What idiot broke a ground-zero rule like that?_

_Eric. Eric Cartman that idiot... but... he's __**not, **__too- that seems like something even __**he **__wouldn't fuck up- if he was running a business, wouldn't he __**know **__better? _

"_Really _doubting the version of Cartman I know is the one who got his shit together." Dee pointed out flatly.

"Neither was mine!" Kartwright shouted, turning away from the door. Knuckles on her right hand were red, with little beads of blood appearing from where the impact had ripped the skin. "He said in the dreams he could remember it from both sides- being a kid and not believing the guy because of some bullshit the adults had been doing at the time, and being the adult who suddenly went from being all put together to... well, who my Cartman _was- _a _fat, stupid, drugged out, poor, grease monkey- _that he talked to himself, and then felt himself _change, _and knew it was all wrong. He _got on his hands and knees and begged me to take him back so he could stop himself- _that he couldn't take both versions being in his head; that he had this _perfect life _alongside his _cesspit of an existence _and he needed to _fix it!" _

"And... _you did it?" _

Kartwright was panting- she'd been shouting at the top of her lungs, nails still digging into her palms for how tightly her fists were clenched. It seemed the process of remembering these forgotten things locked her in place, arriving back into the current space with only her strongest reactions.

"I..."

Her voice drained away. Her head jolted backwards slightly.

"... I had been dreaming, too. It was the only reason I believed him. I..." She grew quiet, pensive. _"I remembered the other version of him- _the one who had his life together. I'd never met him, but I'd been seeing him in dreams that felt like memory echos- ripples from another timeline that had either shifted or collapsed. With mention of _him _founding a time travel company, and what was going on- the investigation I was doing for Kyle... I..."

She paused again.

"_Prick-sucking pony, I brought him back, _and walked right into an ambush."

_Ambush. Set-up- _Kartwright kept saying that stuff, but she still hadn't explained. _"What _ambush?" Dee demanded, getting agitated. Eric could do a _lot _of things, but she was pretty sure _cause fake memory echos _wasn't one of them. It was a loose end. Something that didn't add up, and was possibly a lead to whatever Marie was trying to accomplish.

She felt like, if Kenny was here, he would have already figured it out by now.

"Eric and I were separated upon arrival." Kartwright reported. "I don't know where he went, but we didn't land together. I _know _I hit the right time-frame, but he somehow got magnetted off elsewhere... _fuck, _probably folded into the previous cycle, _he's not an anchor- _fuck, fuck, _fuck- _sorry, back on track."

The woman took a deep breath- slowing herself down and trying to stay on one track while it appeared her mind was shooting off in _every _direction with every second she reclaimed... though every time she used a specific term, Dee desperately wanted to know what it meant to her- she had a vocabulary related to time travel, a few bits of which Dee already knew... and others she very much _wanted _to know.

"_Okay, _so, I started by heading for a company drop point- we'd used company tech to get back, and the drop points had stuff agents could use in any time period; ready-to-go IDs, vehicles appropriate to the place and time, clothes- shit needed to get around and blend in. I got there, I picked up documents and- _taint-biting piranhas, _that's where I got the name! _Haley Kartwright- it was on the fake ID I picked up- **shit- **_anyway, got a vehicle, started hauling ass for South Park... and ran into a government traffic stop. They knew _exactly _where to find me, and _exactly _when to be there. I..."

Kartwright's jaw went slack. She stumbled backwards, like she'd been struck, before her hands suddenly flew up and clutched the sides of her head, letting out a guttural cry of _pain _as she backed right up against the edge of the futon and it took her out at the knees, causing her to fall back on her ass.

"_Fuck- are you okay?!" _

"Do I _look _fucking okay?!" Kartwright barked back, rocking forward, elbows landing atop her knees as she held her head, huffing out heavy breaths. "... _there's so much I forgot... I keep chasing it down, but it hurts... feels like my skull is gonna split open." _

Dee felt like she could relate to that- not just from sorting out new memories from collapsed timelines after shenanigans. Heck, she'd felt like that _recently, _with her brain twisting in on itself on Sunday morning after her father inadvertently triggered the memory of Marie calling her _little Lyssie- _just that tiny bombshell going off inside her skull, tipping her off that her memory was not what she thought it was, had caused her _extreme _distress- she couldn't imagine what it was like reclaiming an entire life and putting it back into context-

Her thoughts cut off. She returned to Sunday morning, and that _trigger _moment of her dad calling her little Lyssie. What were the chances of that? _Why had it been that specific thing _that got her to break through Marie's manipulation and remember? Had that been a lucky coincidence?

_Fuck that. We're in a fucking predestination situation. Coincidences are lies. _

"You should get some rest." Dee decided, standing up as she suddenly realized what she needed to do before she jumped back to Monday afternoon to regroup. If she attempted that jump right now... she was certain it would all fall apart. She'd nearly missed something _big; _possibly the very thing that set this entire loop in motion... if anyone could ever pinpoint what set loops in motion.

_Seriously, the whole **cause and effect **thing going in a circle- what the fuck is with that? Just... **fuck time travel. Fuck it so hard.**_

"What are _you _gonna do?" Kartwright quested from beneath the cover of her brown bangs, her violent outburst having shifted her hat and let a few brown curls escape.

"What I need to do-" Dee responded. "Wendy and I figured out this shit is in a _loop- _I got a message from myself to come here and save your ass from Marie. Everything that's happening _has already happened _by the time I decide to hop backwards on Monday-"

"So you need to secure the origin- _aaugh..." _Kartwright groaned. "_Fuck, _fucking _temporal circle jerks, right? Loops are the worst... _you know when you need to send that message to yourself?"

"In a few hours- after I try to call your phone and you don't answer."

As Dee said this, she circled around the futon to retrieve her coat of many pockets. From one she retrieved the borrowed burner phone with its precious little bit of data. She now knew exactly how she was going to use her singular photo upload; not to trigger some mass public uprising or ensure Marie had nowhere to hide. No- they weren't at that point, yet. They needed time, and Kartwright needed a safe place to get her head together without letting on that she _wasn't dead._

To accomplish that goal, Dee would need to demonstrate a rare moment of subtlety.

"Shit, that thing is probably _compromised- _Marie knew exactly where I was."

As the coat was pulled back on, hard-mask back over her face and hood up, it took Dee only seconds to become Buttlord once again and come back around to Kartwright. Dressed in her _superhero _best, she lined up a shot to take a selfie with the confused woman who stared at the camera with a dazed expression while the photo was snapped. In a snapshot comparison of them, it was easy to see that all the color had drained from Kartwright's face; she was messed up, and needed time to recover.

Dee only took seconds to send the selfie off to a certain police Sergeant, with very specific instructions.

"What was _that _for?"

"Buttlord has pull with the local police- someone should be here soon to take you into protective custody, and deliver you to my house on Monday, just after noon. Assuming I pull this off the right way, Mysterion and I will be in the basement... arriving back where we left off and closing the loop."

"Mysterion- _spank Gandhi with a T-bone steak, _you really _are _doing the whole super hero thing for real... where is he?"

"Right now? His original instance is in a planning meeting with our friends, getting ready to break into a trio of garages that responded to a Facebook post I made asking about weird projects, trying to figure out if the machine was getting repaired at one of them, and hoping to get information on who was pulling the strings- Butters figured that something _big _would need space, power, and tools to fix, and searching local shops might get us a lead."

"_You got Butters in on this, too?" _Kartwright let out a short laugh, but it was followed up by a wince.

"You're gonna hurt yourself, _relax_ already."

"_You fuckin' relax." _Kartwright grumbled, jaw clenched. "... and later?"

"Later, my original instance will be at the garage where I encountered Marie as she was collecting the machine, and Mysterion and I will be there, trying to get the truth of what Marie told me to forget after I realized my memory had been fucked with. Mysterion stowed... _stows? _He..."

"Use past tense. You already saw it happen- even if it hasn't happened yet, address it as remembered." Kartwright directed, sounding _tired _as she advised.

"... right. He stowed away in Marie's truck. That's the last I saw him. I ran back to town, conferred with Wendy, tired to call you, got a message that your phone was no good and to be here at a specific time... and, well, _you know what happened at that point." _

"... so you have no idea where he is."

That... was not something Buttlord wanted to think about. She had decided to trust her partner, and hoped that he had placed as much trust in her when they got separated. The fact that he was probably somewhere dangerous right now, with both Marie and her machine? A machine that _de-powered _Kartwright, if she was understanding the woman correctly, and likely the same machine that had traumatized Amelia? Those thoughts were frightening, distracting; they made her want to drop everything and find some way to get to him, _to save him..._

But she couldn't change her focus right now. No, she needed to stay centered on her side of things; ensure the loop stayed stable. The rest would work itself out.

_Hopefully._

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

I actually wrote the majority of this chapter last light as part of the previous chapter, where there was a pagebreak after Mysterion found the ladder and this was the scene it broke to... then I realized Mysterion didn't actually _do _anything in that scene to further the plot, aside from escape downwards from the main lab area and do a lot of thinking, soooooo...

I TOLD YALL THE SECOND-THIRD ACT TRANSITION FUCKS ME UP. EVERY TIME.

_**ONWARDS!**_

_**-Buttlord**_


	15. Press X To Believe In Yourself

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Press X To Believe In Yourself::**

Buttlord had remained at the cabin until the police arrived to collect Kartwright, getting a ride back to town in the process. The sun had swung low, and while the time on the phone _she _had with her was no longer accurate to this time frame, she could do the math between hops to figure out when it would be safe to return to her house- late enough to miss herself and Mysterion leaving, early enough to beat her original instance coming home.

She'd realized it when Kartwright started really losing it- when she'd gone long past irritated and angry, and physical pain became her punishment for digging further into her newly accessible memories. Playing with the brain's ability to recall always messed it up; sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, but there was always a... _recovery period _to mental fuckery, even if that fuckery was _un-fucking _someone's brain. The Doc was gonna need time to rest, recover, get her head together and put all the bullshit back in context; Buttlord had _no doubt _that woman still had bombshells to drop, but she'd need time to get through each shock-wave or she would _break. _Meanwhile, Buttlord herself could remember a very _recent _incident where she'd gone through a similar incongruity of memory, and how it had fucked with her.

It made her realize that her memory getting triggered wasn't an accident. It wasn't her just... _somehow pushing through _Marie's manipulation. Every time she'd fought back against Marie's voice, it was _active; _she found whichever metaphorical hand was holding her down and she _fought it. _The morning where she'd been angry with her parents, and they had shaken loose a real memory amid the fakery by calling her 'Lyssie'? She hadn't been fighting _anything. _She'd identified no force, pushed against no wall... instead, she'd simply _tripped over _something she had lost.

Which meant someone had positioned that memory for her to trip over it, knowing exactly what kind of conversation she was going to have in the morning, and exactly what words were going to be said.

What had Kartwright said earlier? That she needed to... _secure the origin of the loop? _Sounded like an official term for something she... _theoretically _understood. Time loops, _predestination paradoxes, _were confusing because _cause and effect _could get flipped. Trying to figure out exactly how they happened was an exercise in futility; events fed into each other like a perpetual motion machine- they could be plotted in a circle, understood as a _cycle, _but there was no one point at which the circle could be cut and laid out as a linear path that made sense... _that was what made it a loop._

**_And shit-kicking critters _**she hated thinking about it. Like right now? She was heading home, to sneak into her own house, into her own room, briefly pet her cat as he roused from his nap to mewl pathetically for affection, and tuck herself away in her own closet and wait for her previous instance to get home. To hide in that dark space much like she'd hid and waited for Wendy, wait for her still ignorant and unaware version of herself to get home, lay doing, and promptly _fall the fuck asleep _like the exhausted bitch she was... and sneak out into that dark room to give her a command.

A command that would let her remember who called her Lyssie- to let that memory surface when she argued with her parents tomorrow morning.

Was this the origin of the loop? If she hadn't realized her memories had been muddied, she wouldn't have gone back to learn everything she did about Marie, to hear the comment about Wendy being able to figure things out, to realize Kartwright _and _Marie were other versions of herself and save Kartwright's life. She might have still jumped backwards in an attempt to investigate, but her target might have been different, and this _very specific _chain of events would not have occurred.

Cause was effect. And the effect was the cause.

_Fuck her head hurt. _At least, for once, she didn't feel like _murdering _herself on sight. No, she stepped out of that little closet space and observed her previous version without violent intent... another _weird and mushy rule _that she was hoping Kartwright would be able to shed light on when she could relay information without risking an aneurysm.

Looking down at herself, she remembered how tired she was going to be the next morning. She'd barely had the energy to take off her binder before passing the hell out, curled up under the comforter with that _cursed baby doll _from health class that was going to get used as bait on Sunday. Her cat, _Cartman Junior, _AKA Junior, or sometimes CJ, did not like the doll, but had given up trying to _kill it _for the moment, instead sulkily curled up at the end of the bed with his tail thumping atop the space-themed bedspread... although, since he moved in, space had a light coating of orange cat hair to go with the multicolored stars and planets.

The only part of her body that peeked out at the moment was a tuft of hair and a bare foot she always ended up kicking out and over the edge of the bed- she was just too warm if she was completely under the cover, but anything lighter than a heavy duvet and she had trouble sleeping. Junior had gotten to the habit of _nibbling _those exposed toes a few minutes before she woke up in the morning, demanding to be fed even before her alarm went off. She didn't know why she even set it anymore; he was just as reliable as the digital clock on her end table, or the back-up alarm on her phone... and cats didn't have snooze buttons.

Bending down next to her own sleeping person, she once again had the burner phone in her hand- she'd been lucky in that Kartwright had a cord that fit the device, and she'd been able to transfer over a priming noise without using data... although she didn't imagine she'd be using a priming noise on herself. Unlike most times she'd employed one, she didn't crank the volume on her phone. Instead, she played it lowly- no one in her house had complained of strange noises in the night, and she didn't remember waking up to anything, or even dreaming of strange sounds. And then, once she'd played it, she leaned in and spoke softly to herself.

"_Remember who called you Little Lyssie." _

Speaking to a sleeping brain seemed to be a subtle way to seed a command- she'd have to remember that for the future. Maybe the next time she needed to point Eric's destructive force in a specific direction... or, maybe she'd go into business for herself and bring back that whole 'listen to motivational tapes in your sleep' fad from the 90's... but with a trigger word hidden in there to give herself a personal army the moment she mentioned some obscure bullshit in a public post.

… _eh, sounds kinda evil. Kenny might disapprove. _

That task completed, she stepped back and away... but before she could slip back out of the room and into the night, she got a message. The phone number wasn't one she knew off the top of her head, but the message was expected- it was from Kartwright. Whether the number she was texting from was a burner provided for persons in protective custody, or whether she'd managed to _borrow _one, was neither here nor there... the point was that Kartwright's personal phone was compromised, and had to be left behind at the cabin in case Marie was still monitoring it and its GPS. Kartwright already had her phone set up to ping her e-mail whenever she missed a phone call, however, which meant she just needed to keep an eye on her inbox until she got a notification.

Upon getting said notification, she messaged Buttlord, who, in turn, knew that now was the time to put another loop of _cause and effect _into motion.

She sent a pair of messages to Wendy's number.

[Sent, 10: 58] Kartwright's phone is compromised. Jump back, go to the cabin at 5:30 PM. Wait around the back until the truck leaves. You'll know what to do.  
[Sent, 10:59] Kenny's Burner Settings About Phone

Something slid into place. Some instinctive feeling that she'd done exactly what needed to be done. _Secured the origin _or whatever the hell it was Kartwright said... which only left one last question to her.

Did she go to the basement and return to the time she left, trusting that Mysterion would make his own way back? Or did she risk _fucking up _the loop to try and find out where he'd gone?

Returning to the time at which she left felt like abandoning him. They'd made the jump back together, and returning to Monday afternoon without him just felt...

_It felt wrong- _it made her stomach twist... but what could she do? She had no idea where that truck had gone, and there hadn't been a third version of her in the garage to stow away in the truck from the other side- there was nowhere they could have hidden where she, Mysterion, _the other version of herself, _or Marie would not have seen them.

Standing in the middle of her room, transfixed, CJ meowed at her. He didn't seem perturbed that there were two of her at the moment; he was still agitated about the haunted doll, but not _too _agitated for head pats. Buttlord hesitated, and then gave in, taking the step over to scratch the old orange fluff-ball and distract the both of them from their dilemmas- his desire to fuck up a baby doll that was hosting the ghost of a presidential aide who'd been fucked to death by Mister Garrison some years ago, and her desire to get to her partner and ensure he made it back to the beginning/end/_who the fuck cared _of this loop in one piece.

One of them had the more noble goal, but it was hard to judge which at the moment.

_Does the truck count as a place? _

It was... a strange thought. Ripping time and space, she had discovered the ability to go between places, but it was... _yet another _skill that she was far from having mastered, and did not fully understand. At first she thought it was a function of memory, but a room she remembered could change and she could still make it there... or be exactly the same, and she could miss- either by feet by a mile. More than technical recollection, there was another component she didn't quite grasp yet... and while a vehicle could be thought of like a _room on wheels, _it was also very much a thing that _did not have a fixed location- _different from any other _place _she had attempted to ass-warp her way to.

Like _Ocarina of Time,_ but with farts instead of pretty warp songs... though a case could be made for a _Farore's Wind _joke.

_What's the worst that could happen? _She reasoned to herself._ I end up at the U-STOR-IT lot next to a different nondescript rental truck? Or back at the garage, where I saw that specific truck? Anywhere I end up, I know I can make the leap back to home... and I've got pills galore now. Even if I miss a time frame and need to pick my way back, I have the supplies and the know-how. FUCK! I don't even need the supplies; so long as there's a diner with cheap coffee and freebie cups of creamer on the tables, I'm fuckin' GOOD._

_**I can do this.**_

* * *

Mysterion had hit a dead end.

He had no doubt that the yellow line on the floor had once outlined the most direct route to the main power room; in fact, after traveling some way down the hall, he had encountered a sign telling him exactly that in more black block letters. There had also been other signs, pointing other places, filling out more and more spaces on his mental map... However, upon hitting a set of stairs that, once more, led further down into the complex, he was faced with a problem.

_Water._

The stairwell that presumably led down into the vicinity of the main generator was _completely flooded- _all the way to the top step, and threatening to breech up onto the level of the halls of... what floor was he even on? The main lab could be considered B1, 2, and 3, with the access tunnel below it being 4, which meant he was at _least 5 levels down... _and that was assuming the ladder he'd climbed down hadn't bypassed him on other floors. And now he was looking at a possible B6... but he couldn't access it from here.

He'd heard Marie and her cohort talking about this; Eric had said that the _whole lowest level _had been flooded last week, and that he was both keeping water out while trying to fix the generator. Mysterion had assumed that he meant _keeping it out of the facility entirely, _but it was possible he'd found a solution that simply kept the water out of the key section as a quick work-around.

_If I can re-flood the lowest floor, I can really slow shit down... or maybe set up a failure for a key moment. _

His mind was spinning off in a new direction, a new idea, but he had no idea how to get down there... and these hallways were _very _exposed. Sheer walls, no inlets for doors; just long, barren corridors with the occasional sign and labels on rooms. His best shot of finding a way down to the generator was to circle back, find, and follow Eric without getting seen... but, as far as he knew, Eric wasn't heading to this section anytime soon. He still hadn't come out of the supply room, as far as Mysterion was aware- there was a chance his work was up in the access tunnel at the moment, and he wouldn't be heading for the generator at all until some other radial issue was fixed.

Mysterion put a pin in his mental map on where he _suspected _the power room to be, and took a sharp left from the flooded stairwell. If his sense of direction served, the power room was centered below it's biggest consumer- the machine in the main lab. That cable he shimmied down probably went directly down, purpose built to be prioritized above all else, along with the other three monster wires that were bolted into the base of that _thing. _If he could find no other route down, that way would serve... although it had been a tight fit when it was just him. With all the tools he'd picked up, he didn't imagine it would be as easy to get down, nor a stealthy, as his first shimmy.

_Cross that bridge when you get there, let's just keep moving. There's gotta be other attacks of opportunity- this place is too big not to have other vulnerabilities. _

Somewhere ahead of him, he heard the heavy _thomb _of a heavy door closing, and the tell-tale _clacking _of Marie's heeled boots.

_Fuck, what is she doing down here?!_

The echo made it difficult to know exactly where she was, but it killed his speed in an instant as he went from moving quickly down his new path to pressing into the nearest wall and listening to try and understand where she was in relation to him. It took a few seconds, but the variation of the sound led him to believe she was _not _in the same lane as him... but he had no way of being certain that would remain true.

Glancing up, he made a quick decision. These halls had doors that led into various rooms, most of which he had ignored. It seemed the majority of things down here were various flavors of _STORAGE, _with an alpha-numeric code for each room beyond that generic designation; probably part of some greater filing system- cleaning stuff goes to storage A2, spare parts for toilets goes to storage B8, overflow dry goods goes to storage E3, that sort of thing... he noted that the specific storage room he ducked into was labeled D4. He grasped the knob, found it unlocked, and decided his best course of action was to _hide._

Getting caught wasn't an option. There was a chance that Marie knew better than to kill him on sight, and Eric was... _slippery _when it came to knowledge about his immortality. Sometimes he seemed aware, other times he appeared ignorant. _Now _was not the time to test of that awareness had extended into adulthood. If he got caught, it would more likely result in _capture... _and from there, he imagined Marie would turn him into his happy little helper, and make him sing like a goddamn bird.

_Not an option._

The door was eased shut behind him, gently, to keep things silent, holding the handle until the metal door was settled back into its frame and then slowly rotating the knob back to ease the latch into place rather than letting it spring- he was lucky the hinges hadn't squealed, considering the disrepair he'd seen as a standard. Then, securely behind a solid barrier, he sat his ass down on the floor and turned his back against the door he'd just come through, resting his weight back and feeling a _sigh _escape him as he let the tension come down just a singular notch.

The storage room had been... mildly unexpected. He'd figured it would be like the room he'd arrived into after descending the ladder from the access tunnel; all shelves and bottles and such. Instead, the space was dimly lit by old bulbs that flickered overhead, and he was faced with a room full of filing cabinets. The musty smell of paper that had been enjoying the close company of water for just a touch too long filled his nose. In the center of the room was a desk; cheap like the workstations up in the lab and also showing signs of hating the humidity- _bubbles _having formed beneath the layer of paint that covered the pressure-treated particle board and let it pretend it was something like wood. Atop the desk was a handful of beige file folders, laying open with loose pages scattered about.

He couldn't see much more than that from where he was. He glanced back at the door he'd put his back against. He couldn't hear Marie's clacking anymore; the door had shut out a surprising amount of sound. There also was no window in the door; it was a solid sheet, meaning he could stand up without risk of being seen from the outside.

_Fuck it, I got nothing better to do. _

He hefted himself upwards, carefully approaching the desk with curiosity, and lightly shifting the loose pages atop it until the small typeface was turned towards him and legible. The page he'd turned had been some kind of cover page for one of the open files, which had a _big ol' American seal _in the middle of the page as a watermark, making it look very official and patriotic... and reminding him that this place was a fucking _government facility. _There was also, surprise, a giant red-ink stamp of _CLASSIFIED _across the page, as if there was any fucking doubt when one found documents in a place like this.

Really, he was surprised the US Government didn't just make that part of the watermark. It would save time. Then again, maybe it was _really _fun to use the big red stamp on things... or, as much fun as government employees were allowed to have.

Either way, getting past all the _aesthetic _details and getting to the actual content of the page, Mysterion found his curiosity peaked. The cover page had identifying information of a person; a name, an ID number, a date from some _twenty years ago, _and otherwise... and a project number at the bottom of the page.

_P0069_

That number wasn't funny to him anymore. Seeing it printed reminded him of something else, and it made him shift the cover page aside and find the next loose leaf from that file... and then he abandoned it, checking one of the other files left open on the table, and then another.

"_... Jesus Christ..." _

_Horror _settled into the bottom of his stomach.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

What did Kenny find? _FIND OUT NEXT TIME_

_Probably_

_ONWARDS!  
_

_**-Buttlord**_


	16. Fire Escape

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Fire Escape::**

When trying to go to a specific place, Buttlord tired to focus on a memory of that place in as much detail as she could. In her hopes of stretching the definition of _place _to a specific vehicle she'd seen, which could be considered a setting rather than an object in some sort of _gray area _sense, she had tried to turn herself away from the memory of closing the door on Kenny staring up at her from his hiding place in the cab... but it was the most potent one. It was the memory that took the truck from just any big white truck to being _that _big white truck.

She couldn't keep it out of her head. The more she tried not to remember him looking up at her, making a silent plea, the more the image asserted itself, and it was the image that was in her mind when she made the jump, surrounded by a foul smelling cloud as the world warped and she engaged in that odd moment of suspended existence as she dislodged from the regular rules of time and space.

When she felt like she was standing on solid ground again, and she could wave some of that cloud away while squinting her eyes, she was... uncertain how well it had gone. She wasn't in the garage, nor did she see the white truck anywhere. In fact, what she saw was... a metal door. Gunmetal gray, set into a metal wall, with a metal floor and ceiling that served to make the scene before her utterly homogeneous. She blinked a few times, taking a step backwards since she'd landed pretty _close _to said door, glancing left and right to get her bearings.

_Did I miss? Where am I?_

The first feature she realized was the dim lighting; neglected bulbs overhead that were dirty, covered in spiderwebs and possibly spots of mildew, flickering and giving her a haunted house vibe. Next were filing cabinets lined up along the walls, with rust spots along their bottom edges, like water encroaching on this room was a chronic condition. She suspected this room might smell _swampy _if her own version of _swamp gas _wasn't trapped in the space, creating the worst kind of hot-boxing known to humanity.

"... _Lyssie?"_

A voice from behind- one that had given up his usual gruff tone to break character in a moment of surprise and call her by her name. Her head led as she whipped around, spinning on one heel as she did a one-eight and was faced with-

_Kenny!_

She nearly shouted aloud, her mouth open with the sudden relief of seeing him. The _how _or the _why _could wait until after she'd taken two short steps to hurry over to him and wrap her arms around his ribs and quite literally lift him off his feet with the force of her hugging him with all she had. Tension she'd worked up worrying about him, about him possibly being in trouble or hurt or _worse; _all was washed away in a warm wave of euphoria as he returned the gesture, squeezing her back.

She had no idea _where _or _when _she was, but _fuck it, she found her partner!_

"How'd you..." Kenny began, but he quickly got back into character, returning to the gruff _Mysterion _voice with a cough. "_Ahem, _how'd you get here? You pick up a new trick?"

His volume was low. He was worried about detection. Wherever they were, it wasn't entirely safe. The moment of relief and delight had to give way to tension once more. She put him down, and got her game face back on as she did so. "I... I'm not sure." She answered at similar volume; a low whisper. "I thought since cars and trucks are kinda... _rooms on wheels, _could try and go for _that _to get to you, but..." She trailed off. She didn't understand it, and supposition wasn't going to do anything helpful at the moment. Besides, _she could have someone she could ask about that later. _She waved it off, looking around. "Where the fuck are we?"

"The abandoned lab." Mysterion answered gravely. "Near the lowest floor- the place is in bad shape, and... _holy shit _I've learned a lot, this might not be the best place to catch up. _She's out there right now- _I ducked in here to hide."

_She? _"You mean Marie?"

He blinked, and then picked up a faint smile. "Sounds like you've been learning things, too."

"We can compare notes later." She dismissed, though there was a secret little glow of pride in her chest at having impressed him. She could be blushy and stupid later, when her _senior citizen homicidal alternate universe duplicate _wasn't an immediate concern. "This whole trip was a predestination paradox- I did everything I needed to make sure the loop is solid; we need to go back to where we started before we fuck something up and collapse the whole thing."

"_Shit- _wait, wait, _don't tell me... Wendy?" _

"Been keeping her mouth shut since Saturday night, like a fuckin' trooper." Buttlord confirmed. "Bitch is a pro."

"_Goddamn, _no wonder she was so quick on that bomb threat to get us outta school... but what about the stolen medicine?"

Mysterion's question brought up a good point. Her pills going missing was, to any degree that anything could make sense, the _inciting incident... _or rather, all her pills going missing besides _his _specific stash. If Marie was a future version of herself, one who knew that she depended on those little white pills, and knew enough not only to steal them from her home, her school lockers, and _Wendy's house... _how did she not know that Kenny had a supply, and where he kept it?

… did Marie not know that she would trust Kenny with something like that?

_Was that version of her one that never got close to Kenny? Never trusted him? _

She shook her head. Theories for another time. "Doesn't matter right now. Are you ready to go?"

"_Almost, _I think- I just... you still have that burner phone on you?"

She nodded, taking it out from one of her many pockets and handing it over without question. It was only now that she realized he'd been looking through some of the files in this room, and he was now using the phone's camera to snap pictures of several loose sheets of paper.

"What's this stuff?"

"Autopsy records." Mysterion answered lowly. "The _machine, _it's... they fed _so many people to it- _people like us; people with powers-"

She blinked. He was holding onto a revelation that had shocked and disgusted him. She could tell by the way he gritted his teeth, and struggled to organize his discovery into a direct declaration of what he'd found out. There were open drawers in the file cabinets near him; ones he had likely had to ease open as gently as possible to fight back against the rust and decay and not be heard by any other nearby ears, but he'd still been driven to do so. He was ticking through those files now, taking more photos, working methodically.

"There's _dozens _of them, Buttlord, and who knows if this is the only records room? The mortality rate on that thing... And it goes back _years- _maybe even _decades, I'm not sure- _And Marie's name is on every _fucking _docket as the project lead; she's not just _using _that machine, she _designed _it."

_The machine. _Kartwright remembered it, too; she said she'd been de-powered by it, and Buttlord suspected that Amelia's scrambled mental state had been related to it, since she'd been searching for it. Two survivors, neither of which had escaped _unscathed. _

And now she stood in a room filled with files of the dead. Records of victims who didn't survive the process, whatever it was.

"... you're doing data collection for Wendy?" She quested, swallowing hard.

"Just a sample; I don't think I can get any of these other drawers open without causing a disturbance... Marie came down here a while ago, which is when I hid. She might have gone back up to the main lab, or stayed down here to help Eric- _shit, Eric-" _

"_He's here?" _

Kartwright said they'd gotten separated; something about getting _folded into the previous cycle- _she had no idea what that meant, but the fact still stood that Kartwright had come back to the past with an adult version of Eric Cartman, who had to be... _somewhere. _

"Not our Cartman, a grown-up version of him; he's helping Marie fix this place. And Marie..."

"I know." She cut him off, the combination being one that made her very much want to find the current version of Eric and _beat him until his face resembled raspberry jam, _but that wouldn't do anything if they were dealing with some kind of alternate universe shenanigans. "She's me. So is Kartwright- Marie tried to kill her, but I undid it and got the police to take her into protective custody. But if Eric is _here, _and he and Marie are working _together..." _

She had a bad feeling about this. The version that Kartwright knew was shitty Eric; fat and stupid and probably most like the version that Buttlord knew- but _that _Eric had been having dreams about another version of himself; one who had grown up into a successful adult and gotten his shit together... and then gone back to the past to fuck with his own life.

_Why? If there was a version of Eric who had it all, why would he go back and fuck it up? And if he **owned the fucking business, **how the hell did Marie end up back in time, too?_

There were still pieces missing, but she _really_ didn't like the way the picture was coming together.

Mysterion returned to her, handing the phone back to her for her to stow away. "Ready?" She asked him.

"Almost." He delayed again, reaching beneath his concealing cape to show he'd a number of objects stored on his person- tools, a little flashlight, a bottle of something that was marked with a flammable stamp, as well as an old rag. At a glance, she was pretty sure he had everything he needed to make some kind of crude bomb... or at least start a fire. "I was going to find some way to sabotage the building and delay them, but now that you're here? I've got a better escape route than finding my way back to the surface and stepping into traffic... and that means we can take a _prisoner." _

* * *

Eric hated his life. He hated being fat. He hated being slow. He hated living out of his dirty truck, and he hated busting his ass doing freelance work under the table because he had neither a legal ID nor a birth certificate with which to prove citizenship.

He hated sleeping, because of the nightmares. He hated being awake, because his body always ached.

He hated himself because he remembered being better than this. It came and went, his other life; something fuzzy he was separated from, and yet could still remember vividly in the bleary space between awake and dreaming. He remembered sleeping in a bed, in a house, and not swapping cash for hardcore downers just so he could pass out at the end of a hard day. He remembered putting in the hard work to get his weight in check, and not becoming the bloated being he was now.

He remembered the sweet smile of his wife; most often in that last moment before the dreams faded away and he came back to the harsh reality where none of those things existed anymore. He underwent cycles of remembering and forgetting exactly who he was; almost like he couldn't completely let either life go. Sometimes he was grounded in this version of himself, accepting his fate as an underpaid blue collar worker busting his ass day in and day out until such time as his lack of healthcare caught up to him and he died of heart failure in his shitty, shitty pickup truck. Other times, he was a man of means, of wealth, trapped in a poor druggie's body, with all the _outrage _that entailed.

_It was maddening. _His sense of self was an amorphous thing, and the version of himself that occasionally possessed him had _nothing but contempt _for who he physically was.

_Self loathing _was a way to describe how he felt about himself, and also a gross understatement.

For the first year, he'd been confused and angry, and increasingly uncertain of who the fuck he was. He had a uniform with the name _Eric _on the shirt, so that was how he identified himself. Sometimes his memory reached further back, to his teen years, and even childhood- but again in a _duality _between two different paths, and without any order between them. They intermixed and left him lost, and more assured that he was actually just a vagrant who'd lost his fucking mind and would, in time, die in a gutter.

And then _she _had showed up.

That was when things changed. When a small apartment was rented under her name so he had a better place to sleep, and little favors were done here and there in return. He felt like he _remembered _her, but it was something that was just a little bit out of reach.

She told him to call her Marie. Even that had trouble sticking. Everything did.

Then she told him that she knew about his dreams- those sweet snapshots into a better life that he called _nightmares _because of how disturbing they were when contrasted with his lived experience. She told him they were real.

She told him she could help him get that life back- but she'd need his help, too. _Meeting half-way._

That was the first time she brought him to this place, and _goddamn he hated it. _He hated the walls, and the constant dripping of water. He hated hauling gallons of fuel from the nearest gas station multiple times a week just to keep the little generators going, and he _hate, hate, hated _staring at the same damn breaker boxes and wires day in and day out, trying to fix whichever fucking short was blocking power flow _this _fucking time.

Today was supposed to be a day off- the fucking weekend. Guy could take time off on a weekend, right? Sit in his little apartment, get stoned out of his mind, and maybe drop far enough off the edge to not dream at all.

Instead he was here, in the middle of the night, putting in over time because _she _was all wound up about the fucking _kid _this was all apparently about.

He didn't understand her plan. He'd been assured he didn't need to understand it- and what the fuck did he care? She was paying his bills, gave him a place to live that was better than sleeping in that junker of a truck... and gave him extra cash, which went straight to his habits. She could tell him all this was building a bridge to _Narnia _and he would have rolled with it.

He didn't want to have hope. That other life didn't feel real most of the time, except when it felt _too _real. The idea that he could get back to it, that he could know who he was again, was both _exciting _and _horrifying. _Would he even know how to be that man anymore? … maybe it was better not to believe in it, or her. Why would she help him, anyway? She had means and access he didn't. It didn't make any sense why she'd help some greasy asshole with a pain problem and insomnia.

No, better to keep his mind on his work; at least that shit made sense.

His current task had been replacing a section of corroded cable in the access tunnel beneath the main lab. While the _top _priority was, of course, getting the _machine _juiced up, there was more to that thing than just the big showy bit on top- there was other stuff around it that needed power as well to support the thing, outside of the big fuck-off cables that came directly down into the power room. If the bitch wanted to _calibrate her experiment _so badly, she'd need the whole lab back online at full power, and that meant repairing breaks in the access tunnel below... and probably other breaks as well- 'fix one leak, two more start dripping,' or however that saying went.

Either way, it was time to test progress; to climb down the ladder to where he had a generator running work-lights for him, and plug that sucker in to see if he had done enough to let juice flow through the access tunnel again and start powering some of the supporting machinery.

Arriving at the bottom of the ladder for the _third _time tonight, he was delayed in his task by a smell. The supply room into which the ladder descended smelled of exhaust fumes- something he had the door propped open to vent as a makeshift measure. However, he could smell something else that wasn't burning gasoline.

No, it was a different kind of burning. Not the smell of a motor running, but the smell of something _burning._

"_Are you fucking kidding me?" _He muttered, stepping out into the flickering lights of what Marie frequently called _the utility level; _access to power systems and water pumps were down here, after all. There was also a _fuck-ton of storage, _although Eric hadn't bothered to investigate any of it. That wasn't what he was here for- and what the hell did he care? The most he'd gone into _any _of the rooms down here was to track down _more _bad wiring before it caused electrical fires.

The smell was getting terribly familiar. First reaction was to kill power for this section; there was a breaker switch near the stairwell.

"Shit- _another_ fire?"

To his left as he exited the supply room, Marie was down here- to her credit, she was lending him a hand with replacing more corroded cables, tracking down a section behind a wall panel that was preventing power flow up to the mid-level computer banks- another necessary part of getting the machine online.

The whole lab was kind of like a gigantic metal body- that machine was so wrapped up in the various systems that he doubted he could get it up and running within the next _month, _much less the tighter time table Marie was now demanding.

"No, that's the smell of _power coming back, _obviously." He drawled sarcastically.

"I'll shut down the section." She volunteered, without rising to his comment, turning to rush back to the stairs where power could be killed. He, for his part, grabbed a red fire extinguisher from the supply room, and withdrew a large, heavy flashlight from his tool belt before proceeding along, looking upwards for signs of smoke collecting on the ceiling, as well as tracking density.

Sure enough, black smoke was coiling on the metal roof, and it got darker while traveling along the yellow line that pointed the way to the power room... at least, the original way, before the lowest level flooded and he had to get creative with water management.

The lights went out; Marie had reached the breaker. He clicked on his flashlight, the bright beam powered by 4 D-sized batteries allowing him to continue following the gathering smoke. In time, he turned off of the path to the flooded stairwell, and found himself outside one of the storage rooms. He didn't bother with its numbering; what mattered was there was smoke billowing out from the edges of the door, and vicious red-yellow light flickering within the seam between it and the floor.

Gingerly, he touched the metal door. _Hot- _but not _too _hot. He reached for the handle to throw it open before doing so would burn his hand.

He'd placed the fire extinguisher on the floor to reach out and test the door. When he reached to pick it back up, his hand clawed thin air.

He blinked.

He never saw them coming.

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

_You'll never see 'em comiiiiiiiiiiiiiiin'~_

And now I have Persona 5 music stuck in my head XD

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


	17. Back Where We Started

**::My Future Me, Myself, and I – Back Where We Started::**

Mysterion had to admit, this was not how he expected to get out. The majority of his plans ended with him either escaping the lab and _hitch-hiking _back to South Park, or finding a fairly quick and painless way to take himself out so he could return with everything he'd learned in a timely manner... though, finding out that this was all _predestination _made him thankful he didn't attempt that; killing himself would have been a fast way to fuck with the loop, seeing as he most certainly had _not _known a single thing about this shit on Sunday... and he honestly didn't know how his effective immortality would jive with being temporally displaced. If there was more than one of him, would it be like when Buttlord died and the memories from the other version got folded in through dreams and echos?

He had no idea, but thankfully that was off the table; replaced with a new plan that went quite well. A plan that began with setting a fire using the bottle, rag, and flashlight he'd picked up, as well as the tools he'd nabbed to pull the flashlight apart enough so the wires and battery within it could produce a controlled spark. The bottle was opened, the rag stuffed inside as a wick, and the makeshift lighter used to ignite it before tossing it into a pile of files they'd pulled out of the cabinets in the storage room, closing the door behind them as they hid.

Things moved quickly when the lights went out. Eric arrived with a bright flashlight, but it could only illuminate one area at a time. Mysterion had remained on one side while Buttlord circled, picking up the fire extinguisher and using it to bean the guy in the head. Mysterion got hold of him as he staggered, forcing a hand over the man's mouth before he could cry out in pain, hoping to muffle him enough that Marie didn't immediately know something was wrong.

He felt Buttlord grasp him by the forearm, reaching across Eric's back to do so. The next he knew, the three of them had been displaced.

All at once, they were back where they started- the basement room at Alyssa's house, sometime near midday. In a single instant, they'd gone from a dark hallway filling with choking black smoke to a well-lit and familiar hangout... although the air wasn't exactly _clear. _

Mysterion ducked his nose down into the fabric that pooled around his neck as part of his cape and hood, trying to protect himself from the reek- the drawback to Buttlord's abilities was always the truly _vile smell_ it produced. Sometimes he worried about her guts, and whether chronically maintaining that kind of gas was doing some kind of internal harm.

A quick look around the basement revealed it to be near exactly the way they left it... save for a key difference.

There were people down here, now. Two adults, in fact. One was Alyssa's dad, who wore a wide-eyed expression of shock while frozen on the very last step of the stairs down to the basement. Just ahead of him was a woman that Mysterion had met on a previous occasion... although this was probably his first time seeing her in full light.

_Kartwright._

Getting a clear look at her, he wondered how he never realized it before.

When Buttlord had informed him that it was not only_ Marie, _but _Kartwright _as well, with whom she shared an identity with? He'd been too deep in his own revelations to really react. It was just another shock, another surprise, and one that had been playing a distant second to finding out just how many people that machine had _killed _in whatever experiments that lab had been running- a lab that was apparently _led _by one _Marie Verankert _for at least the past fifteen years- maybe more. He'd been skimming, so he didn't have a solid date on when her name first appeared as the department head. Marie hadn't just landed a couple weeks ago to start messing with Alyssa's life. She'd landed _more than a decade ago, _playing some kind of long game that they still didn't fully understand. He'd still been digesting _that _when Buttlord informed him that there was not just _two _of her, but _three, _and Marie had attempted to kill Kartwright.

There hadn't been time to chase after that shit, not when they'd been in an enemy lair.

Now they were out, back into a fairly safe zone... and there was Kartwright, who seemed _much _less surprised than Alyssa's father to see them suddenly appear in a noxious cloud with a rotund extra.

_Fuck, the resemblance was unmistakable. _The green eyes, the roundness of her chin and nose, and the strength of her jaw. Even that faint little _upturn _at the end of her nose; which he found fucking adorable, and the rounded shape of her eyebrows- now that he was looking for similarities, he was amazed that he'd failed to see it before. All the key features were _identical, _altered only by the differences of age, weight, and puberty.

… _damn, Lyssie's gonna have a pretty good rack when she's all grown up. That's a natural D cup, at **least**._

The resemblance only got stronger within the next few seconds. Kartwright's face had been composed; calm and restrained, and very possibly the image in the dictionary for _resting bitch face. _He suspected she had been brokering objections from Alyssa's father on her even being here, or maybe just ignoring the man as she came down here with him only a few steps behind. Upon registering that there was an additional person with the pair of junior heroes that had just ripped their way through time and space to appear before them, however, Kartwright's face twisted into an enraged snarl; eyebrows crashing down and gritted teeth appearing as her upper lip drew up in disgust accented by rage.

She'd locked onto Eric's mildly flopping form. The man was awake, but disoriented, kicking his legs and trying to shake Mysterion's hand off of his face. His heels got traction against the concrete, and he managed to twist away from Mysterion a moment after they'd landed, getting his hands up like he meant to fight back and looking around with wild eyes.

"_What the FUCK are you fuckers playing at?!" _He barked at once, panic turning his face red as one hand groped for his tool belt, no doubt trying to find a blunt object that could be treated as a weapon. "Where the _hell _am I? What's goin' on _nhar?!" _

The man they'd abducted was Cartman alright- finally seeing him banished any doubt that this _Eric _could be any other sufficiently fat man named Eric with some interesting verbal tics.

It was interesting, though; the man's blue eyes focused on both him and Buttlord, and showed no sign of recognition. If this was a grown-up Cartman, wouldn't he at least _dimly _remember the Mysterion costume? … unless he was some _alt universe _version of Eric, from a version of reality where Kenny had never picked up the whole masked hero thing.

There was neither time for a reaction or even continued supposition. The hand that Eric had reached back to fumble along his tool belt was seized at the wrist, and then twisted up behind his back, making the man cry out in pain as he was restrained from the rear. Kartwright had stepped up behind him, her other arm appearing from beneath his shoulder. From the look on Eric's face, having an arm twisted up behind his back was painful, and the other arm was forced upwards and out by the grasp Kartwright secured around his shoulder. Her next motion was a mixture of violence and grace, pressing his torso forward and pulling his extended arm back while she thrust a knee against the back of his leg to make his stance buckle, yanking the fat man down and around in a smooth motion that forced him face-first to the floor. Before his mass had fully landed, she'd pitched herself over his back, still keeping force on his twisted up arm and kneeling down; one knee down on the ground to keep herself steady, her other shin firmly across the backs of his knees to further restrict his ability to wriggle, and the arm that she'd secured around his shoulder releasing to instead seize the extended arm at the elbow and pin it to the floor.

All of it took less than ten seconds, and she had complete control over him.

… _well, that's the weirdest boner I've ever had so far. _

"What the _hell _is going on here?!" Alyssa's father shouted, still on the last step of the stairs, his jaw hanging somewhat loose. "What... _what are you doing out of school?!" _

The question was directed at Buttlord. Mysterion had to hold back a laugh. Everything that was going on in front of him, and _that _was the question he asked?

"We needed to investigate the missing pills." Mysterion spoke for his partner, as he often did, adhering tightly to his character and keeping his amusement out of his voice. Alyssa's parents _still _didn't know who he was behind the mask; this was the _wrong _time to break character. "It couldn't wait. I'm sure you understand, sir."

"I... _I..." _The man stammered, looking between Buttlord, Mysterion, Eric, and Kartwright. It seemed he was having a rough day. "... _did you find out anything?" _He finally asked.

"We know who took them." Mysterion confirmed, thankful he still had some _authority. _Alyssa's parents were at least mildly aware that Mysterion _protected _their daughter from government agents on the regular; something that gave him credibility. "But the _why _and _what to do about it _still need to be figured out."

"I told you." Kartwright chimed in. "I was invited to come here today, at this time, because it was when they'd be getting back with information. The police were directed to drop me off. _I'm here to help." _

Beneath her, Eric was attempting to kick his legs and get free, but being pinned at the knees meant it was only his shins and feet that could even attempt to flop around. Much as he was trying to rise up from the floor, he had to settle for screaming colorful words into it.

"... Sport?" Alyssa's father stared at her, lost and confused, asking for confirmation... or maybe reassurance. Possibly both.

Buttlord gave a short nod. Mysterion got the feeling that Buttlord shared a very specific relationship with her father that allowed something small, like that nod, to convey that _yes, everything is okay. We did this because it's necessary. Please trust us._

"Well... _uh... _can I get anyone anything? Snacks, drinks... a rope?"

Mysterion had to grit his teeth not to chuckle aloud, nestling his chin back down into his muffler to hide the smirk that spread across his face. It was mildly amazing to watch Alyssa's dad go from _panicked _to _outraged _to _awkwardly supportive _in the span of a minute.

"_YOU CAN CALL THE FUCKIN' POLICE!" _Eric screamed from the floor. _"THIS IS **ASSAULT**! I'VE BEEN **KIDNAPPED**! FUCKIN' **HELP** ME!" _

"... maybe a ball gag, if you have one." Kartwright commented dryly.

"... I'll see what I can do...?"

Mysterion watched as the man backed, somewhat helplessly, up the stairs until he could no longer see down into the basement, at which point his feet turned and he continued the rest of the way up at a faster pace. Until such time as the door shut behind him, the only sound in the basement was that of Eric's belligerence.

"_I'm gonna beat all you fuckers to death with a fuckin' wrench, what the fuck is this shit even-?!" _

"Calm down, Eric." Kartwright directed. "I can't speak for them, but _I'm _not going to hurt you unless I have to."

Mysterion watched as Eric's struggles engaged in a sudden pause. Kartwright's voice held no specific power over him as far as he could tell, but the arrest rather came from a moment of recognition. The fat man on the floor was quiet and still for a second before resuming with even greater fervor, trying desperately to roll himself over.

"_WHO WAS THAT?" _He roared out, a touch of hysteria entering into his tone. _"WHO THE **FUCK **WAS THAT?!" _

Out of the corner of his eye, Mysterion saw Buttlord pulling out the burner phone he'd borrowed to her, approaching where Eric was held secure to the ground by Kartwright and bending down just in front of the man's head. He wasn't sure what she was up to at first, until she looked back to him and signaled to him that he needed to cover his ears.

_Oh shit, she downloaded a priming noise... shit got pretty crazy on your side, huh? Maybe I need to invest in a set of good earplugs... just to be ready for future operations that might involve more of this stuff._

Mysterion complied as he considered future equipment to keep in his pockets, gloved hands pressing his hood in against his ears for multiple layers of muffling. Even then, he could still faintly catch the aggravating edge of the priming noise as she played it. Kartwright, directly next to her and unable to cover her ears, didn't flinch.

He could see Buttlord's lips moving, but she was speaking softly enough that he didn't hear whatever directive she gave Eric. The big man stopped wriggling like a fish out of water, and after a second of hesitation Kartwright released him before helping him to a sitting position on the floor. At that point, his partner looked back to him and gave him a nod; a signal that he was safe from getting caught up in a command.

"Nicely done." Kartwright praised as she rose up from the floor; Eric appeared to be soothed enough that he didn't require any hands on him to keep him from lashing out or running. The woman who had been holding him down now looked around the basement, sighted the rolling office chair that Alyssa kept by the long work table beneath the window, and drug it over so she could take a seat directly in front of Eric without sitting on the floor. Alyssa, meanwhile, had no such compunction with the concrete and remained down low and shifted from kneeling to sitting on her butt.

Mysterion stayed standing, slightly behind the duplicated pair and peering at Eric curiously.

"What... what the hell do you guys want from me?" Eric quested, in a much less angry tone now. He was still scared and confused, but it sounded like Buttlord had brought him down out of _fight or flight. _"Where am I? How did I get here? I... I was at the lab, I was working, and then..." One of his hands went up, groping at his head, presumably where Buttlord had whacked him with a fire extinguisher. No doubt the scene was disorienting and frightening from his point of view... but, again, _shouldn't he have remembered some part of this? _The duplicates of Alyssa showed she wasn't unique to this version of time or reality._ Certainly _this Eric remembered some version of her? The _smell _should have been enough for him to recall.

"It's okay, Eric." Kartwright's voice was low and even, getting his attention at once and causing him to focus on her. "I know you have a lot of questions, but I need you to answer one for me, first- _do you remember me?" _

"_You?" _Eric blinked, his face screwing up slightly. It seemed as if he were about to explode into vitriol again, but something stayed that reaction as his eyes narrowed, blinking multiple times before widening to the size of teacups. _"... you-! You were- we- **you abandoned me!" **_

"_Abandoned_ you?"

Kartwright's very professional and calm tone showed a crack of discordant offense. Her voice didn't raise, but it grew hard.

"We were supposed to come back together, but when I landed, _I was alone! _It was just _me, _on some fuckin' street, all by myself, people lookin' at me like I was fuckin' crazy when I asked where I was! You said if we came back, you could fix it, that I could stop having both lives in my head, _but they're both still here! The dreams haven't stopped, __**they've gotten worse! IT'S BEEN YEARS, ALYSSA, WHERE THE HELL HAVE YOU BEEN?" **_

The man who sat before them on the floor didn't flail or lash out, but his voice raised as his face reddened and his eyes went glassy. He was on the verge of tears as he roared out his accusations to Kartwright, calling her by a name Mysterion knew was only shared with a select few persons. It jolted him to hear it come out of Eric's mouth, and he watched as it jolted Buttlord as well. It seemed none of them, not even Kartwright, were prepared for what he had to say.

Kartwright leaned forward, a hand coming out to grasp Eric by the front of his overalls. Her right hand, which Mysterion noticed had a nasty scar on the back of it, and scuffed knuckles that had been bleeding a day or so ago by the look of the scabbing. Despite being smaller than Eric, it appeared his had enough strength in that arm to lever the heavy man up off of his ass as she herself stood upright, dragging his back upwards along the wall until she could step up and _glower _at him from beneath curly brown bangs.

"_You _sold me out- I was on my way to come find you after we got separated, and I ran into a government blockade. _They knew how to restrain me, they knew to gag me, they stuck a fucking spiked ball up my ass to make sure I couldn't warp out of there—they knew **everything **they needed to know to make sure I was helpless- **it's because of you all my powers are gone! THEY TOOK EVERYTHING!" **_

Kartwright had begun in seething manner. Quiet, deliberate, detailing her capture in a way that made Mysterion sympathetically cringe. By the end, however, her voice had dropped an octave and became a booming thing, shouting out the last three words as if they could be used as blunt objects with which to beat Eric's head in.

Eric shrunk, leaning his bulk hard against the wooden wall that came down from beneath the stairs as their support structure, forming the cupboard where Buttlord kept her uniform when she wasn't wearing it. His heels dug in as if he might crash through that wall and escape as he gaped at Kartwright.

"What... _what are you talking about? How could I have sold you out? __**I **__didn't know where I was, I didn't have money, or a phone- _even if I wanted to, how could I have...? _Why would I have...?" _

Buttlord stepped up next to the pair of adults, putting a hand on either shoulder. They both looked at her, and she shook her head from side to side. All at once, Kartwright seemed to realize that she was about to do something terribly brash, and released Eric. The man sunk back down to the floor, and the woman fell back into the office chair.

All at once, Kartwright seemed to realize something. Her slouched posture stiffened, and she sat up again. The sudden movement made Eric flinch, fearful he was about to be grabbed once more, but that isn't what happened.

"... you're right." She muttered aloud. "You didn't know where the company drop point was- _I just... I assumed it was you-" _

"Oh, _that's _nice and freakin' fair!" Eric groused. "You were gonna beat my head in on an _assumption?! No wonder Kyle dumped your ass." _

Mysterion blinked. _Kyle? _He focused in on his partner, but she was rather pointedly _not _looking at him at the moment. All he got was the back of her hood.

"Don't you _dare _bring him into this!" Kartwright shouted back. "The only reason I was involved with the company to begin with was because he _begged _me to join up to get dirt on them- the only reason I had access to their tech, _the tech we used to get back here in the first place, _was because I was working with him!"

… _well, this is a flavor of weird I wasn't expecting today. _Despite his curiosity about... _all _of that, Mysterion stepped in to lightly tap Kartwright on the shoulder, getting her attention. "Could I get a recap?"

The woman looked up at him, blinked, and then nodded slightly. "Oh- I supposed Dee hasn't had the time to tell you... it's alright, I've got a little more context now, makes it easier to lay it out straight. You both should hear this, from the beginning."

"Who the _fuck _are these kids?" Eric demanded.

"... you don't remember your friends?" Kartwright quested, legitimately curious. It wasn't deadpan or sarcastic. She seemed surprised that Eric wouldn't recall them, even in costume.

The question seemed to strike the man. He looked between Mysterion and Buttlord, blinking a few times. Then a few times more. "... _shit, no way... _but that means... _aaaugh... no..." _

There was a moment of recognition, but shortly after Eric turned his head downwards while his hands clutched into his thinning chestnut colored hair. His feet kicked out as some kind of involuntary motion while his body did its best to curl up into the tightest ball he was physically capable of.

"_It's all mixed up- no, no, no, NO, NO, NO-!" _

"Dee, calm him down!" Kartwright barked.

Buttlord dove forward on the floor, grasping Eric by his shoulders and shaking him until he looked at her. Softly, Mysterion heard her say; _"Take deep breaths, let them out slow. The memories can't hurt you. Don't try to hold onto them, don't try to push them away. Just let them be." _

"... echos. He's caught up in echos." Kartwright observed with wonder as Eric complied; his shouting stopping for his breathing to slow... although he still seemed intensely disturbed.

"_Echos?" _Mysterion quested. "Like memory echos after we've changed something in the timeline? Those are usually short, and come in like... dreams, or _d__éjà vu." _

"Sometimes." Kartwright agreed. "The experience of echos depend on a lot of things- what changed, how much, how the changed was resolved, _if _the change was resolved, and who is perceiving it. The human mind wasn't _designed _to hold onto multiple versions of reality at the same time, and not everyone can handle memory echos without losing their shit. Eric came to me in the first place because he was having vivid dreams about a different life he hadn't lived, and an intense sense that he'd fucked something, _bad, _and needed to go to that moment- we assumed to _fix it. _I had been catching echos, too- a different version of reality from the one I was living in. Not... _better, _per say, but different. It was enough that I felt the need to investigate... and Eric was losing his mind. I could see that whatever was happening, if we didn't do _something, _the fight between two possible timelines in his skull was going to rip him apart."

"What... _causes _something like that?" Mysterion asked, still looking on as Eric seemed to be whimpering details of his current visions to Buttlord, still holding his head but no longer pulling his hair out.

"In short? A possible collapse, but time hasn't decided _which _timeline is going to fall apart yet." Kartwright sighed heavily. "A collapse will cause a single chain of echos, something that touch other timelines and fade; like ripples on water... but instability in a timeline is more like something _vibrating _on the surface of the water; the ripples are continuous. For people who are sensitive to that sort of thing, it can drive them out of their own head... and if you're caught between _two _unstable timelines, where things could go either way?"

Her own gaze returned to Eric. There was maybe an ounce of sympathy on her face.

"Both of his futures still have a _possibility _of existing. As long as that's true, this version of him is going to suffer."

"Why hasn't it just split into two versions of reality? Alternate universe style?"

"... cause he came back with an anchor. Someone who's traveled through enough time that shifts and collapses don't change their past or their future- only direct interference." She paused. _"He came back with __**me**__." _

Kartwright was quiet. It sounded like she was still putting things together- Mysterion had to assume an older time duplicate attempting to murder her was triggering a _lot _of revelations, and he still didn't have the full story on what had gone down on Buttlord's side of things.

"... It was Marie, wasn't it?" He posited. He may not have had all the details, but catching even a snapshot of Kartwright's story? That _someone _sold her out, and she eventually ended up at that lab and de-powered? When _Marie _was the one who had been running that place for more than a decade? It made sense. Marie, an older version of both Kartwright and Alyssa, would probably have some means of knowing where Kartwright was, when she was going to arrive, and exactly whom she needed to call to have Kartwright captured. He wouldn't be surprised if Marie had also manipulated Kartwright's memory to _use _or _control _her, much as she'd attempted to do with Alyssa. "She's the one who got you captured by the government, oversaw you getting de-powered. She knew you were going to come back."

Kartwright blinked at him, and then let out a faint laugh. "Heh... Pick shit up quick, huh? Yeah... got a theory as to _why, _too."

The door into the basement opened, and Alyssa's father came half-way down the stairs; enough that he could stick his head over the railing and look down into the basement. Mysterion quickly picked up on the man's comportment; he was confused again.

"Uh... Champ?" He called down, using masculine pet names for his kid. "There's... uh... someone at the door for you."

Glances were exchanged between himself and Buttlord. He could tell they were thinking the same thing- _Wendy. _The girl must have recovered enough to join the party; she and Stan were both sick today, and wouldn't be stuck under school supervision while police investigated a false bomb threat on the middle school. She'd also been aware of these temporal shenanigans and keeping her mouth shut since _Saturday night, _like the fucking pro she was. Mysterion would not at all be surprise if their third member had shown up in full Call Girl gear. Buttlord got to her feet, hurrying up the stairs with an enthusiasm that was excited to be getting their team back to full strength.

Mysterion glanced to Kartwright, who waved him off. "Go on, I'll keep an eye on this guy." She assured, moving from the rolling chair to having a seat with Eric on the floor, leaning on the same wooden partition.

Mysterion did not need to be told twice. He was right on Buttlord's heels at the pair of them hurried up the stairs, past her father and through the door to the living room. Hitting the top of the stairs, they both made the sharp left turn to look to the door...

_And stopped dead._

It was not Wendy who stood just inside the door, having shut it behind himself. It wasn't Stan, either, who was another possibility. It wasn't a _kid. _It was an adult man, casually taking off his shoes and shrugging off his coat, hanging up his hat like he was perfectly at home. His actions were calm, languid, in a way that almost projected tranquility despite the shock of seeing him.

The surprise was enough that Alyssa spoke aloud. She didn't try to drop her voice to sound masculine, an effective break in character.

"_You- _What are _you_ doing here?!"

Shouted, more like.

The man just inside the door let out a soft, grandfatherly chuckle as the dark skin of his face crinkled into a smile. "It's been a long time, hasn't it, _New Kid? _Though, I suppose they don't call you that anymore..."

That _voice; _authoritative and smooth; buttery velvet on the ears with a ponderous cadence. There was no mistaking him.

_Morgan Freeman had arrived._

_**To Be Continued...**_

* * *

**::The Author's Corner::**

AND THAT'S IT FOR THIS STORY!

Yes, I very much intended this installment of NKS to be structured like a two-part special. If every story is an 'episode' then 07 and 08 are two parts of a season finale... which means _ULTRA CLIFFHANGER._

ALSO WE CLOCKED IN UNDER TWENTY CHAPTERS AND I HIT ALL THE PLOT POINTS I WANTED TO HIT! WOO!

As I always remind y'all, make sure you catch the next story by adding me to your author alert, and keep an eye out for the next story: _**New Kid Stories 08: End Of The Line**__._

_ONWARDS!_

_**-Buttlord**_


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